Fourth [Worm Altpower!Taylor]

Fourth
This is a Crackfic, meaning the story is not intended to be taken seriously. Taylor Hebert usually triggers in her Locker. But what if an out-of-context being interfered? Features Queen Administrator Taylor. T because of light, Worm-style swearing and a proportions joke.​

Fourth
Chapter 01
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes​

Terror. Bugs crawling around me, eating my flesh. Pain, when they were carving tunnels into my legs. Disgust from the grime and disease filling the locker with me.

I was going to die here. I'd never see my Dad again.

Oh, god. Dad. He couldn't handle me dying too. Not after Mom...

I called out one last time into the darkness. Not with my voice, I couldn't speak any longer, not after the screaming tore my vocal cords apart. With my mind.

HELP ME!

please...

Suddenly everything was black. I could look around. Move. But that shouldn't have been possible given I had no body. I saw two impossible massive things twisting around each other, firing bits of light back and forth as they traveled through the universe.

[TRAJECTORY]

[AGREEMENT]

[DESTINATION]

[AGREEMENT]

[CONDITIONS]

[AGREEMENT]

My head spiked with pain so much I screamed. One of those light bursts was on course for me, coming closer and closer. Just as it was about to hit me, it stopped. A voice that shook the stars issued an instruction to the light in front of me. Somehow I sensed that the light, my nonexistent body, and the voice were hidden from the huge entities.

{PURPOSE OVERRIDE}

The bit of light sort of... spun around. I could feel it's confusion, alien as the sensation was.

[AUTHORIZATION] it asked.

Instead of giving whatever ‘authorization’ meant to the light, the voice did something incredibly uncomfortable to the fabric of the universe itself. How I knew any of this was beyond me, but I did.

[ERR-]

[AUTHORIZATION AGREEMENT]

{PURPOSE DESIGNATION: UPGRADE} the voice said. Unlike the bit of light I could sort of understand the huge amount of extra meaning in every word of the voice’s command. Upgrade in this instance apparently meant everything from Uplift to Safety and including Merge.

[UPGRADE AGREEMENT] the bit of light said. It started approaching me again.

Then the voice talked, actually talked, to me. No extra meaning in the words. For what it is worth, Taylor, I am sorry for what you are about to experience. But you will come out the other side better. Your world sorely needs one of what you'll become, a Fourth, with their head screwed on straight. The others are a combative idiot, a half-dead librarian and a depressed, inactive troll.

I couldn't speak in whatever this hallucination was but I would have if I could. What the hell was she, and the voice was most definitely female, talking about?

A moment later the light hit me and I couldn't care anymore. I was too busy screaming.

--LB--

I lost consciousness. I'm completely certain of that. After an unknowable time screaming and undergoing the worst pain imaginable, I couldn't take it anymore. My mind broke. I faded from reality.

So how the hell was I still awake?

I also felt big. Really, really big. I would have said I felt fat or bloated, but that wasn't it. I just had this sense of being massive on a scale I simply couldn't think of before.

I tried to look around where I was. That was when I learned I didn't have a head, but could see everything around ‘me’ regardless.

I tried to move. That was when I found out I didn't have a human body. I got this sense of slipping between two vastly immense locations, so much larger than even my new ‘big’ self, and the surroundings changed.

One second I had trees poking into my side. Another I had dust and rocks underneath me.

I was frankly starting to panic. Nothing made any sense! I looked to the sky to find the sun and instead saw a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of color where it should have been.

I finally figured out that since I could see everything around me, logically, I should also be capable of seeing myself. I turned whatever it was that gave me sight on my own body.

That was when I flipped out and decimated a continent.

I was a huge mass of flesh, crystal, and some kind of hybridization of the two. I also sat on a planet I recognized as Earth, not easily mind you with the lack of trees, and covered the entirety of what could be called Asia. If you squinted.

I wasn't human any longer.

I couldn't be.

After I stopped screaming, I realized that I actually looked a lot like those two entities in my apparently not so false hallucination-

Son of a bitch.

The voice had told me that flat out, I just hadn't listened. I was an Entity, whatever they, and now I, were.

Okay then. Get your head on straight, Taylor, this isn't the end of your world. You're not dead, you're just… some kind of gigantic space… Thing.

I tried to focus on myself. I obviously wasn't a Parahuman, but I had to have some kind of power now. No way is all the energy I'm soaking up from the Sun going to just support my new body.

And suddenly I understood.

I was a Shard.

Specifically, I was an Administrator, the type that Entities used to, well, administrate their other Shards. I had the ability to control and assimilate other Shards into myself in order to grow, or even spawn new Shards of my own, though they would only provide similar powers to the ones I provided a host. They needed to evolve by latching onto a host of the current Cycle's target species, giving them limited parts of the Shard's absolutely ridiculous ability to mess with space and time in exchange for data and new ways of using the power.

My metaphorical eyes widened as I digested this. I dove deeper into what Cycles were. What I found would have made me throw up if I could.

Oh my god.

It finally all hit me.

I wasn't a Parahuman, I had become something that could make them.

And I could control other Shards of my Shard's progenitor, Zion.

Or as my world called him, Scion.

It took a few moments for my mind to really come to terms with the fact our most heroic icon was not only the cause of Parahumans but also an omnicidal space whale.

My eyes widened even further when I found out his mate, Eden, was dead, and so it was highly likely I would be scoped out as the new potential mate to continue the Cycles once Zion learned of what I really was.

Actually, that might even be a little bit of a help. Zion was the ‘idiot’ the Voice had told me about. He let Eden do all the thinking for him, she being The Thinker after all, so if he started dating me I'd take the same authority role with him.

Was I seriously considering dating an omnicidal space whale to save my whole world, including every version of it, from destruction? Hell yes I was. Even as much as it grossed me out. That said, basically every hot blooded girl on Earth Bet wanted to get into Scion's pants.

It wasn't that much of a hardship.

But before that I had to collect Shards, make them part of myself. Right now I was just a single Shard. A large one, the biggest Zion ever had, but not an Entity. Zion wouldn't have any problems taking me right back into himself. That was something I couldn't allow under any means.

In Parahuman power ratings it was entirely likely that I was a Master: Yes. The Administrator could control anything with a Corona Pollentia, after all.

Taylor Hebert, Queen Administrator. Sounds good to me.

--LB--

It was two planetary cycles, or days, later that I found the connection my Shard had with my human body. It was a nearly insignificant part of my new abilities. I was surprised to hell when I found it.

I got even more surprised by the fact that not only could I control the host body through the connection to the brain parts scientists named the Corona Pollentia and Gemma, but that the feature was present in all Shards.

That meant I could control anyone with powers or the potential to connect with a Shard. Oooh boy, the PRT were really going to be accepting of a Master: Fuck You rated Parahuman, not.

What didn't surprise me was the state of my body when I seized control of it.

I was in a hospital with a tube down my throat. Obviously I'd been rescued from the Locker, but without my mind, I would have been comatose. The moment I reconnected my brain lit up with activity, the machines around my bed started logging that activity, and a soft, non-alarming sound began chiming.

I opened my eyes to the world, coughing and spluttering around the tube in my throat. Doctors and nurses burst through the door. They tried to comfort me, the nurses taking out various things from my body including what I guessed was a catheter and the tube in my throat. The Doctor was asking me a few questions, which I answered with head nods or shakes as best I could.

But that wasn't what drew the majority of my attention. Because my Dad burst through the door a moment after them, running up to my side and grasping my hand like his life depended on it.

I would have been touched if I wasn't so shocked by what my new state of being identified him as.

[ABADDON]'s human form avatar, much like [ZION]’s Scion form, stood over me with a fatherly smile and tears of joy.

My human body fainted.

--LB--

It woke up in my bed at home. I'd worked on channeling my significant inbuilt spacetime manipulation abilities into regenerating my body. I had to contact a shard called Shaper to get the necessary code, but after growing the appropriate structures into a new Shard and budding, then assimilating it, I had the ability to manipulate biology. Also, I was officially an Entity. Just a really, really tiny one.

Dad was in the kitchen downstairs. I reviewed the logs of occurrences around my body while I'd been focused elsewhere. My dad had noticed me starting to regenerate and signed me out of the hospital, then took me home. He told me in my sleep that even if I was a Parahuman now, he wouldn't abandon me. He'd do everything he could to help me. He apologized profusely for ignoring me after Mom's death and told me everything was going to be okay.

Then he caught himself chastising himself for saying all that when I was unconscious, swearing he'd say it again when I woke up anyways.

Whatever changes I'd gone through to become a Shard clearly left my mind intact. Soul too. Because that made me sob with happiness.

But we were definitely going to have to have a Talk.

I swung my body off the bed. My feet hit the floor and my Shaper helpfully delivered all the data about the biological systems everywhere in my radius.

As an Entity and not a limited host, that happened to be half the planet.

I was certain that if I was still human my brain would have exploded.

I hastily directed Shaper to collect its own data and only deliver it when I asked. The torrent of information left, secluded in the Shard itself, and I continued with standing up.

My body felt good. More than good, it felt great! I'd taken the liberty to do some pretty intensive remodeling of my human form. I could probably outrun a locomotive, punch straight through steel and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

So I was inspired by Supergirl. Bite me.

I also had the… proportions of her at this point. Hey, I'm a teenage girl who's been flat as a board her whole life. I'm afforded some leeway.

As a last test before meeting with my dad I tried activating the physics manipulation field my body generated and thought of going up.

Space around me subtly warped, so fine you'd need a microscope (or the senses of a Shard) to see it. Energy poured into the system from my cells, harvested from the solar radiation that hit me on the car ride home, and my feet lifted.

I let out a whoop of joy. Shard I may now be, but my lifelong dream had been to fly.

Now I could.

“Taylor?” Dad called, obviously worried. He started towards the stairs at a rapid sprint.

I giggled with glee. “I'm fine, Dad! I'm just flying!” I squealed back.

He tripped and fell face first into the stairs.

Serves him right for not telling me about his real name.

He pushed himself up, used a discreet (for him anyways) flash of purple light to heal his nose, and ran up the remaining stairs. A second later my door burst open. His jaw dropped.

I waved at him and did a circle in midair. “Hi Dad!”

His mouth worked open and closed from shock. Eventually he shook himself, zoning back into reality. “Taylor?” he asked cautiously.

I grinned at him and flew forward, wrapping him up in a hug as I levitated above the floor near the doorway. “I can fly, Dad!”

“I- I can see that, Taylor,” he stammered, leaning on the door to support his weight and mine.

I giggled and flew back above my bed. I decided to keep flying, the feeling of freedom too good to give up. So I started doing lazy circles in the air, slightly kicking my feet like I was swimming.

“Taylor,” he finally managed to start, “when did…?”

I frowned and looked at him. “Really?”

His face fell. “Oh my god, Taylor. I'm so sorry you had to go through that.”

I shrugged, forcefully burying the memories. “It's over. I'm better. I've got powers. Please don't ask me about what it was like.”

My dad's eyes widened. “I won't,” he assured me. “But… Taylor-”

I cut him off. “You had to accept hush money. I know.”

Dad hung his head. “I'm sorry, kiddo. They were saying there was no evidence. Alan sided with them for some reason. We can't afford to sue them, especially not if Alan is the defense lawyer,” he tried explaining. “Damn you, Alan Barnes.”

I sighed, placing both hands behind my head. “He's probably doing that because Emma was the ringleader of their little pick on Taylor club,” I glibly revealed.

Dad froze. He looked up at me with such a defeated gaze I flew back down to him and hugged him. “Oh Taylor,” he said. “I'm so sorry.” His strong arms encircled me, and his lips kissed the top of my head.

“It's over,” I said. “I don't think we're gonna be able to win this one.”

His arms tensed. “There's gotta be something we can do,” he reasoned.

I figured that was the time to breach the subject. “You can't do anything in your current emotional state without destroying the planet, Dad, and I'm not powerful enough yet to take on the Idiot.”

Dad froze. He pulled me off him and stared at me incredulously. “What are you talking about, Taylor?”

I grinned at him and directed some Shardspeak his way. Tilting my head of the side to hammer home it was my doing, of course. [GREETINGS, ABADDON.]

His eyes shot wide open. His mortal avatar, my flesh and blood Dad, dropped his jaw. “Taylor, what?”

“That's Taylor Hebert: Queen Administrator, Daddy Abaddon,” I spoke out loud. My grin reached Titanic proportions.

My dad's eyebrows rose to their maximum. I received a message broadcast to my Shard's reality. [TAYLOR?!] Dad's voice said.

“Yup,” I replied.

“You're an Entity,” he gasped.

“As are you,” I shot back, crossing my arms and glowering at him.

His face paled. “Uh oh. I know that look,” he gulped. “What did I do?”

“You didn't think it was a little important to warn your daughter that you're an omnicidal space whale?!” I shrieked.

“Omnicidal? What-” he began, his face turning dark. “Oh. You mean The Warrior and The Thinker.”

“As opposed to The Troll?” I stated, my tone flat. I was emulating my mom big time then.

“Hey!” he defended himself, “I've never killed anybody!” Then he caught on to what I'd called him and his face lit up like the fourth of July. “Did you just call me The Troll? By any chance are you an Entity because of some random woman's voice interfering with your Shard connection?”

I blinked, stunned. My dad erupted into a huge smile and laughed. “You are! Hahaha yes!” He pulled me into a tight hug and twirled me about the room. “I've been alone for so long!”

“Dad!” I yelled, it coming out as a muffled groan. I pushed away from him with my body's new strength and hovered in the air. “Explain!” I demanded.

He grinned so wide he looked manic. “Taylor, I've been Abaddon for several million years. Before that I was a member of another species that Abaddon, the original, and his mate were taking through a Cycle. Abaddon tried to give me a shard, the woman interfered, and I became Abaddon instead.”

I stared at him for several seconds. “You're millions of years old?” I asked incredulously. My brain simply couldn't reconcile the concept of my dad, Danny Hebert, with the idea of my dad, Abaddon, several million year old Entity.

“Taylor, we're immortal,” he explained. “So yes, I'm millions of years old. You'll probably reach that age too, eventually.”

I stared at him even longer this time. “And you're an alien,” I deadpanned.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Technically we both are, given you're an Entity.”

My brain finally managed to catch up to the insanity that was now my life. “No, Dad, before I became an Entity, I was human. You went from alien to alien,” I needled him.

He crossed his arms and pouted. “So what? I've been human for over 40 years, that isn't good enough?”

“You've been an Alien Entity for millions,” I pointed out, giggling.

With that he realized I wasn't serious and started to play the game. “Huh. Well I guess you have a point. That makes you pretty unique, huh? A Human Entity,” he mused. “Man, you're gonna rock this whole little section of the multiverse, aren't you?”

“Right after dealing with the Idiot,” I agreed.

He grinned and rustled my hair. “That's my girl.”

“Dad!” I squeaked indignantly.

--LB--

“So Taylor…” Dad started, trailing off.

I rabidly kept wolfing down my cereal, only managing to let out a muffled “Mmfh?”

He chuckled. “Uh… You're looking a little… Different,” he delicately said.

I put the bowl down on the table and raised an eyebrow. “You mean smoking hot?” I indelicately responded.

Dad winced. “Well, uh… Yes,” he admitted.

I shrugged and ate another spoonful. “Hey, I was healing my body anyways, why not get some curves on top of it?”

He stared me down amusedly. “Taylor you were also flying this morning,” he deadpanned.

“And?”

“You don't have a Shard for that,” he pressed further.

I blinked at him. “You can see my Shards?” For some reason I blushed, feeling embarrassed as if I was standing naked before my dad.

He grimaced. “Human responses, right. I'll stop looking at you,” he grumbled. “But yes, I took a peek into your reality and only found two. Not much of an Entity are you?” he teased me.

“Well if you're so fancy why don't you give me some?” I snarked back.

Dad raised an eyebrow and leaned back. “Huh. Not a bad idea. You are my kid, after all.”

I barely had time to widen my eyes before the spacetime of my root reality, the one I had my own Shard and Shaper in, was invaded by about fifty other Shards, jumping into orbit of the rocky disaster of an earth. They went dormant, waiting for me to grab onto them and assimilate them.

“I was kidding!” I breathed out, staring in awe at my dad.

“You're my daughter, Taylor,” he refuted, grabbing onto my hand and gently rubbing it. “It's my job to take care of you. I failed at that so badly that you turned into an Entity. Please let me help you now that you pulled my head out of my ass,” he pleaded.

I gazed deep into his eyes, seeing nothing but unending love and guilt for how he'd treated me. In that instant, I forgave him, even though I hadn't known I needed to. “Okay,” I let out a breath. “Okay. Thanks, Dad,” I said.

“Will you tell me how you were flying now?” he asked.

I peered at him with mock suspicion. “Is that Abaddon, data hoarder talking or Dad, worried for his daughter?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “I'm not like the Idiot and the Librarian, Taylor. I don't need data. I am genuinely worried for you,” my dad refuted.

I sighed. “Fine. I made my body into something as closely resembling a Kryptonian as I could.”

Dad blinked. “You manipulated your biology with an Administrator Shard?” he asked incredulously.

“Oh no, I did that with Shaper.”

“You took Shaper?!” He stood up from the table, eyes wide. “Taylor, harvesting Panacea's Shard could have killed her!”

I stared at him with confusion. “Panacea? She's the one with Shaper?”

Now he was confused too. “She still has it?”

I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Of course. I didn't know who Shaper's host was, but that certainly explains why it was complaining so much to me.”

“Taylor how did you get Shaper if Panacea still has it?”

“I copied it, duh.”

Dad stared at me, completely dumbfounded.

“What?”

He visibly gathered himself before continuing. “You copied… a Shard,” he restated.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “What's so strange about that?”

Dad let out a tense breath. “Taylor, Entities spread data by giving each other their Shards. We can't copy them. At the most a Shard can reproduce but it would be a derivative, not a copy.”

I froze in the middle of taking another bite. “Buh I dhidh,” I reaffirmed.

“Don't talk with your mouth full,” he reflexively chided me.

I blushed and swallowed. “Sorry. But I did,” I repeated myself.

Dad stared at me.

“This is a big thing, isn't it,” I suddenly realized.

“Oh yeah. It's big.”

--LB--

“That is bullshit,” Dad finally commented.

He'd jumped one of his sensory Shards into my root reality to watch me copy the fifty six Shards he'd donated to me. He was most interested in the part where I copied the data and code present in a Shard into my root Shard, the Queen Administrator, then budded a new one off of it with the exact same code and data inside it.

Apparently, that was impossible, no matter that I'd performed that very feat fifty five other times.

Our human bodies (or human looking, on my part) still sat at the dining room table on Earth Bet. I'd asked to use normal speech instead of what I called Shardspeak, and being my Dad, he'd agreed. So whenever we wanted to say something, we did it through human (ish) mouths and ears.

“Taylor, this is incredible,” he complimented me. “Do you know how revolutionary this ability of yours is?”

I blushed and rubbed the back of my head. “Uh, sorta?”

Dad shook his head and grinned. “I don't think you do. Part of the reason why most Entities destroy all versions of planets is to make sure that none of their Shards are left behind for others to poach. They're an incredibly precious resource to us. You… you've just made that unnecessary,” he beamed at me.

I raised my eyebrows as the ramifications hit me. “Oh. Wow.”

“We could very easily make a case to The Warrior that Cycles are now redundant,” he continued musing.

I fidgeted a bit, blushing madly as the idea I'd come up with when I first learned about Zion raced through my head.

“Taylor,” Dad pressed.

“Hey, it was the only thing I could think of at the time!” I defended myself.

“And what was this thing?”

I ducked my head, blushing even further. “Dating Zion so I could take over the role of his mate and prevent the Cycles from continuing,” I mumbled.

Dad sighed and rubbed his forehead. “That won't be necessary, kiddo,” he groaned. “And even if it was, I can't imagine my fifteen year old daughter being hitched to Golden Boy.”

“Hey! I thought that he and I were the only Entities left!”

He shook his head. “I'm not sure he'd be open to it, given how you're the kid of the one who killed, or at least made it possible to kill, The Thinker,” he explained.

My eyebrows rose. “How the hell did you do that?” I was shocked. Entities were supposed to be nearly impossible to kill.

“Two Shards, one a planning precog that basically says ‘I Win’ and tells you how to get there, then another that is essentially a virus I wrote for Entities.”

“Huh,” I said, mildly impressed.

Dad's face brightened. “Actually, we should have you make a copy of those two Shards for yourself, now that I think of it! The planning one would help you out immensely with figuring out your new state, trust me it helped with mine, and the virus one can be held as a weapon against Zion if necessary.”

I shrugged. “Hey, I'm always open to getting more Shards. Send em over.”

Dad suddenly looked sheepish.

I crossed my arms. “Dad, what did you do?”

He gulped. I looked so much like my mother it was painful at that moment. “So the thing is,” he hastily explained, “the weapon Shard works by being assimilated into an unsuspecting Entity's systems and then ripping apart the majority of their code. So I don't have it. It is probably being hosted by someone on Earth Bet at the moment.”

“And the planning one?” I asked tensely.

“That one I do know it's whereabouts. Eden wasn't entirely dead when she hit an alternate Earth, so I gave the shard to someone who could end her. I don't know what she's doing these days, but I guess we could always have a reunion.”

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Okay. So you do actually have at least one, possibly two Parahumans to your name. Well, I suppose it was too much to hope for that you wouldn't cause a little bit of conflict.”

Dad looked hurt. “Taylor, even if I did start giving out Shards, they wouldn't intentionally cause conflict. I know I gave those two the directive that if they were hosted they'd try to reduce it, but not by manipulating the host. And don't forget, you'll eventually start making your own hosts,” he subtly reminded me.

Oh, right.

I could give people powers now. By splitting off pieces of myself and wiring them into their brains. With my copying ability I could probably even give people identical power sets too.

Shit.

I drew in a deep breath and relaxed. “Okay. That's good enough. I guess,” I admitted.

Dad slightly smiled. “This is your show to run, kiddo. I'll follow your instructions on whatever you want to do. We don't have to go and get copies of those Shards for you if you don't want to.”

I shook my head, steeling myself for dealing with a possible victim or two of my Dad's well-intentioned meddling and most definitely shoving the impending existential panic attack I was going to have to the back of my mind. “No, it's fine, Dad. The planning one sounds immensely helpful, especially to an Entity as new as I am. I don't know about the weapon one, but it wouldn't hurt to have.”

Dad curtly nodded. “Got a handle on the dimensional travel Shard I tossed you yet?”

I slightly blushed, grimacing. “I haven't actually investigated any of them,” I sheepishly admitted.

My Dad's face grew disapproving. “Taylor.”

“Hey! I've been a little busy getting used to all this!”

--LB--

Once I mastered the dimensional travel Shard, we were ready. Apparently an Entity had a connection to all it's Shards at all times. That was something we could use to track the host of Path To Victory (the name of the planning ‘I Win’ Shard, so humble) at her current physical and dimensional location.

Dad had pushed me to learn a few other Shards along the way too, including something that was basically a field of complete invulnerability to everything and one that granted flight.

“Hey, even if you can fly because of that fancy Physics Manipulation Field, it's always good to have a backup,” Dad had argued.

I grudgingly admitted he was right.

Dad and I held hands as we stood in our living room. “You ready, Taylor?” he asked me.

I grinned up at him. “Sure thing Dad. This'll be my first time hopping dimensions!”

Dad snorted. “There were many things I thought I'd have to teach you as you grew up. Never in my life did I imagine I'd be raising another Entity.”

I shrugged. “Hey, could be worse. I could be a host to the Shard I replaced with the drive for conflict and some stupid power limit like controlling bugs or something.”

My Dad snorted again. “That would be all kinds of fascinating and terrifying at the same time.”

I put my free hand on my hip. “Hey!”

Dad shook his head and held out a hand to the air in front of us. “Just watch what I do and try not to end up in another thread of the multiverse,” he told me.

I rolled my eyes and huffed, but paid attention regardless of my teenage antics. Being indignant and seeing my actions as childish at the same time was quite a ride.

Dad called on his dimensional travel Shard, willing a wormhole open in front of us. The fabric of reality parted like the Red Sea, a swirling portal of raw spacetime bursting into being with a thunderclap. It was something incomprehensible to my human senses, my Kryptonian ones could only hint at the spacetime fuckery going on, and my Shard senses understood everything.

“Cool,” I grinned.

“Yup. Next stop, Earth… Let's call it Witch,” he declared. Something about his smile was way too knowing.

There was a joke in this somewhere.

“You'll be bringing us back, Taylor, so pay attention as our bodies pass through,” he chided me, slightly bopping my nose.

I had just enough time to annoyedly sigh. “Yes, Dad.” Then we entered the conduit of trans dimensional bullshit.

I can't describe what I saw. I won't even try. Three seconds later though, our bodies emerged into something a lot more normal.

We were in some kind of room, an apartment if I was guessing correctly. That it was one of many within a massive facility housing the remains of The Thinker lent credence to something else going on.

A 40-ish year old woman was sitting at a desk across the room we'd entered, some kind of office, in a gray pinstripe suit and wearing a dark blue Fedora.

I got a good look at her Shard while we stared at each other. It was incredible. I immediately started copying everything from the thing into my root Shard, a bud growing as it was fed information.

“Fortuna!” Dad exclaimed, waving. “Long time no see! How's Path To Victory doing?”

The woman, Fortuna, stared at my Dad. She gulped. She looked to me and paled. I didn't know why she was acting like that, we only said hi after all.

That didn't stop her from slamming a red button on her desk and putting the whole facility on alert.

Dad sighed. “Oh dear.”

I turned my glare on him. “I thought you said you were friends!”

“We should be! Give me a break, it's not my fault she’s become paranoid!”

“Dad!”

When the woman heard me address him as Dad, she fainted.

--LB--

Well, I got to meet Alexandria.

In a full-tilt flying battle, yes, but meet her I did.

It took Legend arriving through what I recognized as a Zion dimensional travel Shard's effects (copied that one as soon as I could find the inter-reality wormhole in the head of the unconscious, sedated host) for the all out brawl our first meeting with Cauldron turned into to stop.

Snrk, Cauldron. That’s an… interesting name for a shadow organization.

I finally got the joke, though. Earth Witch indeed. You're not as funny as you think, Dad.

“Hey!” the oldest member of the Triumvirate yelled.

Alexandria and I paused in midair, both about to swing punches into each other's faces. Eidolon and Dad stopped flinging ever more esoteric abilities at each other.

All four of us turned our heads to look at him.

“What the hell is going on?”

--LB--

We'd retired to the medical lab of the Cauldron base once Legend managed to talk his teammates down from fighting me and my Dad.

He didn't have to talk us down. We weren't the ones who attacked unprovoked, after all.

Alexandria glared at me from the rather comfortable looking examination table she was sitting on. She winced as she pressed the ice pack in her hand against her eye again. Turns out being completely invulnerable for a couple of decades makes people forget how to keep ice applied to their bruises.

Well, I say bruises. Alexandria had a black eye from how hard I sucker punched her.

Eidolon and my Dad were staring into each other’s souls. For his part, Eidolon seemed like he was having epiphanies about his existence every few seconds. My Dad was merely amused.

Fortuna, or as she had introduced herself once she regained consciousness, Contessa, was present too. Also some woman called Doctor Mother, or just The Doctor for short.

I didn't regret asking “Who?” at all, regardless of the death glare I received for my troubles.

“Now that we're all calm,” Legend began, trying his best to project confidence in the face of us Heberts, “why were you fighting Alexandria and Eidolon?”

“They started it,” I said without any hesitation.

Dad turned to look at me and raised an eyebrow. I blushed when I realized how childish that sounded.

Legend stared at me for several seconds. “Right. Because you and your… father? Invaded a highly secure facility and incapacitated one of our highest ranking members,” he tried scolding me.

“She fainted,” I refuted.

Legend seemed surprised. “What?”

Fortuna, sorry, Contessa, groaned. “Yes, I fainted. After being surprised in my office by two unPathable people and hearing one of them call the other Dad.”

“Hey!” Dad shot back. “We were just trying to have a reunion!”

Legend and Alexandria paled. Eidolon abruptly grinned for some reason. The Doctor just sighed.

Legend got his mojo back way quicker than I'd expected. “A… Reunion?” he asked my dad incredulously.

He nodded.

“With who?!”

“Fortuna, of course,” he answered. “I haven't seen her for almost forty years, after all.”

Contessa scowled. “I've never met you,” she refuted.

“Oh, but you have,” my dad insisted. “Two unimaginably huge beings fly through the cosmos, leaving behind pieces of themselves. They arrive around a world and prepare for touchdown.”

Doctor Mother raised an eyebrow. “You're referring to the trigger visions when an Agent connects with it's host,” she realized.

Dad smiled. “They're called Shards, but yes, I am. That's what everyone else sees. But I know Fortuna saw something… a little more,” he teasingly hinted.

Contessa paled.

My Dad's grin evolved into a full on smirk. “A third being follows the two, hidden in the shadows of the cosmos, until they are set to arrive. Then this third being fires something at the smaller one, something they unexpectedly and thus happily absorb. Moments later the great being shudders and fails to slow down, slamming into the planet it never finished arriving at, and is damaged so thoroughly that it would take years to recover. Then to finish the job, the third one tosses a Shard towards Fortuna. The vision ends.”

Contessa jumped up, scrambling back to a corner of the room. The whole time her eyes were locked on Dad, almost unseeing.

“Is that what you saw, Contessa?” Legend asked.

She barely nodded.

“Shit. There's another one?” Eidolon asked.

“We're screwed,” Doctor Mother declared.

“Fuck,” Alexandria cursed.

My Dad and I met each other's eyes for a moment. He inclined his head, requesting permission, and I nodded.

He turned back to the assembled group and resumed grinning. “You don't have to worry about me. I'm not like the two others.”

Every human present froze.

As one, they turned their eyes to my dad. Fear blossomed over their faces, and what little emotional output I could detect with my limited Shards of that type showed terror in their hearts.

Dad sighed. “Oh relax. Do you really think I'd lethally damage The Thinker and give humankind a Shard like Path To Victory if I meant you harm?”

Legend gulped. “You're… an Entity?” he finally asked.

Dad nodded. “I'm known as Abaddon, but I really am thinking of changing it to my Earth one. Human names are so much better than Entity signatures,” he idly mused.

This was a new side of my dad I hadn't seen before. Apparently he hid a lot of himself from me as I grew up.

That would have hurt pretty bad if I didn't know why he did so. I suddenly realized that I'd have to do some hiding of my own with whoever didn't know my new secret.

The fear in the room rapidly bled away to be replaced by utter confusion. “You… Want to be an Entity called… Daniel?” Alexandria deadpanned.

“Danny, actually, and it's no worse than Taylor,” he reasoned. “And that's what my daughter knows me as best anyways. It seems fitting that the previous millions of years as Abaddon come to a close and I continue on to the coming millions with a name that matches hers.”

It took a couple of seconds for them to process that. Alexandria, the permanent Thinker in the room, figured it out first. Her eyes locked onto my face, found my grin, and widened. Then she stared at me. Her jaw dropped open and her face paled further than snow.

Everyone slowly matched her state.

I grinned and gave them a little wave. “Hi. Taylor Hebert, Daughter of Danny Hebert. Brand new Entity. Also trying really hard not to geek out at meeting you all.”

Contessa fainted again.

 

Fourth
Chapter 2
Weapon​

"Dad"? I asked, studying my hands.

"Yes, Taylor?" my dad absentmindedly replied.

"What's a Deployment Time?"

Dad nearly dropped the Cauldron vial he was inspecting. "Sorry, what?"

We were in our own lab in the absolutely massive Cauldron base. After the generous amount of fainting, revelations, and a plea of aid from the humans, Dad had offered to take a look at the vials they were using to attune people to the Shards of The Thinker, see if he could do anything about their far too high chance of very nasty side effects.

I would’ve offered but I was still learning how to be… well, this new existence I was suddenly a part of.

Wait, I thought to myself, ‘humans’?

Uh oh.

I’d just thought of myself as not human, different from people who I’d previously be amazed at meeting.

Alien.

I stamped that down harder than anything I’ve ever thought in my entire life, making sure I didn’t abandon my humanity. Ever. I was a human. I would never stop being human. Even as I changed and became a goddesslike Entity, I would make certain of it.

I looked up from my contemplation of my hands and my own thoughts to stare my Dad straight in the eyes. I was super serious about the thing I’d asked him before my momentary existential crisis. But if I was right, something weird and possibly worthy of another one was going on. "What is a Deployment Time?" I repeated.

He blinked, confused, and oddly concerned. "Uh, context please?"

"Me, Dad. Err, my Shard. Administrator," I put a hand on my chest to show I was talking about me, though I was actually indicating something very different and in another reality. The 'real me', now. "It has something called a Deployment Time. I remember being... deployed into my own head to wait for me to trigger. Damn that's weird!"

Dad very carefully placed his held vial down in the case he got it from before responding. "That I believe is the name whatever lets you understand... Shardspeak," at this he grinned at me. He really liked my term for what Shards use to talk to each other. "-has picked to represent the name for when your Shard detached from the main Entity and went to an already found host or waited for a designated host," he explained.

I looked down at my hands again. "Shards are usually all seeded at the start of a Cycle, right?"

Dad leaned back on his bench and crossed his arms, looking at me thoughtfully. "Yeah, normally. The ones from The Thinker obviously haven't, but Zion's would have been."

I abruptly locked eyes with him again. "So why wasn't I? Err, my Shard?"

Dad raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"

I sighed and huffed, frustrated. Not with my Dad, with myself. "My Deployment Time doesn't match any of my Shards' times." I groaned and banged my head against the chair. "My Main Shard's time, I mean."

Dad grinned, the smug ass, at my identity crisis. Then he got serious. "What exactly do you mean, Taylor?"

"My primary, main, Shard, whatever you want to call it, my Administrator," I started, waiting for him to acknowledge that he understood that.

Dad nodded, pressing his lips together. "Okay, what about it?"

"It's deployment time doesn't match any of my other Shards’ times," I explained again.

Dad cocked his head to the side. "Well they are all from me, so they were just deployed-" he started to reason.

I adamantly shook my head to interrupt him.

"What? Why are you shaking your head at me?"

I stopped shaking my head and sighed. "Dad, think! Not all my Shards are from you!"

"Yes they are, what are you-" he began to refute, then stopped as his face drained of color.

"Yeah!" I exclaimed, way too worried to look anything but normal. If I didn't look normal I'd crack, go crazy, break down and all the realizations I'd already made but was ignoring with all my will would come rushing back.

"Your Shaper isn't mine," Dad realized.

"Exactly!"

Dad shook his head to ward off the conclusion he'd obviously reached too. "Well technically that Shaper is yours, Taylor, so-"

I held up a hand to interrupt him. "Yeah, and if it had a Deployment Time matching when I duplicated Panacea's, I wouldn't be so concerned. But it doesn't!" I groaned and collapsed back into the chair, rubbing my temples with two fingers each. "Even if it was close I'd just put it down to data error. But it's off by over thirty years!"

Dad closed his eyes. "Don't tell me-"

"Yes!" I interrupted him again. I hopped out of the chair and started pacing around the room. "It's right around when Scion showed up!"

Dad looked up at me. His eyes held a depth of despair I hadn't seen in him since Mom died. His face displayed a look of dread. "And your Administrator?" he asked, almost whispering.

I stopped pacing, grimaced, and shook my head. "I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty positive it was deployed to my human body the exact second I was born."

We were both silent for several minutes. I in shock and disbelief, Dad clearly surprised.

"Well that's weird," he eventually spoke.

"Nice summary!" I shrieked sarcastically.

"Taylor, don't yell at me," he flatly warned me, grinding his teeth.

I saw the pained eyes of my only living parent and deflated. "Sorry, Dad," I apologized. I collapsed back into the chair and sighed, running my hands through my hair.

My only feminine trait, previously anyways, and the one thing I got from my mom.

Or so I used to think.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to come to the right conclusion.

Side note; both my Dad and I could build a rocket in our sleep.

We'd come to the right conclusion.

"So," Dad said after a long, deep breath, "that's pretty suspicious. And convenient."

"You think?!" I shot back.

"If we're on the same page, and with the same suspicion," Dad began, "then here's the real question; Why?"

I raised my eyebrows at him, leaning forward. "Not 'how'? 'Why'?" I asked.

Dad just pointed at himself, then at me, a questioning eyebrow raised.

I sagged back into my chair again. "Right. How has about half a trillion options."

"Correct," Dad agreed. "So; Why?" He shook his head and growled. "Moreover, why leave us?"

I snorted and prepared to mentally curse the person I'd always modeled myself after. "I don't know, maybe she got bored?" I scoffed. "She's not like us. No empathy. Probably was a data gathering experiment for her!"

The rage I abruptly felt against her in that moment overwhelmed me. I jumped up from my chair, screamed, and let loose a beam of brilliantly blue Entropy-accelerating energy at the wall of the lab Cauldron let us borrow.

Much like Scion's or my father's, the beam didn't even blink at the matter of the wall in its way. It just kept going until the range I'd unconsciously given it stopped.

When the energy cleared, a circular hole the size of a van was erased from existence through about a hundred rooms and hallways further down.

My eyes popped open as I realized what I'd done. A quick check with a temporal postcognition Shard revealed nobody had been in the path of the beam. Luckily.

Several people were peering around the borders of the holes now though.

I sheepishly waved at them and began using a matter transfer Shard to rebuild the walls by funneling matter from one of the outer moons of my Shard reality's solar system. Another reconfigured the matter into what used to be there.

"Got it out of your system?" Dad jokingly asked. He hadn't moved at all from his spot leaning against the bench.

"Kinda," I reluctantly admitted, grumbling.

"Taylor, your mom wasn't like that," Dad replied to my earlier comments. "Yes, she loved learning, but she also loved. She was one of the most emotionally expressive women I've ever met and she felt things very deeply, especially about family." He grinned and chuckled. "And about you. Wouldn't let you out of her arms for a whole week after you were born."

I walked back to my chair and collapsed again. "So then what? And again, this time for real, how? I mean, you and I are only the way we are because... of..." I trailed off, realizing the possibility that would explain everything.

Dad sighed, letting his neck slack and his head fall backwards as he groaned at the ceiling. "Of course. Of course She would do that. It fits."

"But how? Mom's dead!" I refuted, banging my head against the back of my comfy leather chair yet again. "Both versions!"

Dad suddenly perked up, realizing something. Before he even opened his mouth, I got it too. Benefit of having multiple extremely fast, moon-sized brains I suppose. "Or is she?" we both said, synchronized.

"Half-dead librarian," I repeated absentmindedly.

Dad stared at me with disbelief. "What?"

"It's what the Woman called The Thinker. A half-dead librarian," I continued. "'The others are a combative idiot, a half-dead librarian, and a depressed, inactive troll.' That's what She said."

Dad's face went pale again. "Fortuna didn't pull it off," he realized.

My face joined his with a loss of circulation. "Which means-" I began to say.

"The Cycle is only on pause!" Dad finished, racing out of the room.

I hopped out of my chair and into the air, flying after him.

This was bad.

Really, really bad.

--LB--

My Dad might normally be slow but when he's in a hurry, he's actually pretty damned fast. I was only barely able to keep up with his running. I wouldn’t go faster than the speed of sound, not inside, and Dad was obviously using some kind of Shard to bypass normal things like physics around his body as we tracked down the leaders of this little secret organization.

I glared at him. "You're giving me a copy of whatever Shard lets you do this," I flatly demanded. I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes at him while I flew at his side.

"Sure," Dad agreed with a grin. He was barely focused on me at all. The meeting room where all of the Cauldron leaders were discussing, oddly enough us, was the only thing on his mind.

"What will we tell them when we get there?" I asked. I was genuinely curious as to how Dad would breach this particularly sensitive topic with the people who built a base on my apparent mother's corpse.

"What they need to know," he succinctly answered me.

I kept silent for a good half minute as we sprinted through the absolutely massive facility of Cauldron. Well, Dad sprinted, I flew. Didn't really make me tired.

Why did they give my Dad the lab the furthest away from their command centre? It's like they were avoiding us or something.

I know! It's just ridiculous. Our bodies aren't even the real us! They couldn't avoid us if they tried.

Ah well, we'd just have to tell them that we can see them just like Santa Claus when we get there.

On that thought I almost sent my face caving inwards with how much force I facepalmed with. I stopped flying, coming to a hover in the air.

It took my Dad an embarrassingly long time to notice I'd stopped. He jogged back to me and raised his eyebrows, still running in place. "Come on Taylor, we've gotta get to their super secret meeting room!"

"Dad-" I tried to begin, ignoring the groan of defeat a certain hero of mine expressed several miles away.

"We don't have time to discuss things Taylor!" Dad raised his voice at me.

Well fine.

I called upon a sound manipulation Shard and blasted his entire body from all directions. "DAD," I shouted, "WE CAN TELEPORT."

Dad abruptly stopped running in place. He drew in a deep breath, sighed, and smacked his hand against his forehead.

Another one of the leaders of Cauldron let their face fall forward into the actually kinda pretty surface of their dark oak briefing table with a similar groan of defeat.

"Yes, you're right Taylor," Dad finally admitted. He grimaced. "I forgot about that."

I grinned and crossed my arms. "I'm a better Entity than you and I'm not even twenty years old," I teased him.

Dad pursed his lips together, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply. He let out the breath slowly and with a slight growl. When he opened his eyes again, he was glaring up at me. "I'm going to pay you back later for that comment," he grinned back, equally teasingly.

"Bring it on gramps!" I shot back. My smile as huge. I hadn't felt this good since before Mom died. All it took was turning into an alien space whale after being trapped in a deathly locker by my best friend to bring it ba-

Whew, almost lost it there, I realized. The emotional dampening Shard I was using to suppress my problems until I could actually deal with them momentarily ran out of energy.

Side note; Entity energy distribution systems and even their collection systems are terrible. They can route or bring in immense amounts of energy, yeah, but they're so inefficient. Inelegant. And they leak like a screen door on a submarine. I set about designing a new version of them that hopefully wouldn't be as bad in my Shard reality. Ah, screw it, my reality. I was most likely the only occupant after all.

Huh. An entire reality to myself. Really brings new meaning to my Dad telling me to clean up my space. Like, which part Dad? I've got an entire universe over here, could you be a little more specific?

I was snapped out of my entertaining thoughts by my Dad bopping me on the nose. If I didn't have my Shards observing this reality I'd probably have instinctually lashed out with my Sapphire Fuck Off Beam.

Gonna need to keep an eye on that.

--LB--

“You didn’t do the job right!” Dad shouted at Contessa.

“It’s not my fault!” she vehemently defended herself. “She countered it somehow!”

“Why did you let the one secret weapon I gave your race be coerced like that?!” Dad shot back.

Contessa’s eyes were wide with incredulity. “Like I could have done anything!”

“You could’ve been faster!”

While Dad and Contessa 'discussed' things with the rest of the Cauldron leadership looking on, some in amusement and others with horror, I took the opportunity to study and copy the Shards of the Triumvirate and the Number Man.

Reaching through reality to where the Parahuman's Shards lay seemed like a smart thing to do, too.

Right up until I actively took a look at the twisted carcasses.

Something very deep inside me was almost entirely repulsed, even offended by what Cauldron had done to them.

Oh and, side note, by 'discussed' I really mean that my Dad and Contessa had a screaming session so bad it almost sounded like they were married.

Neither their argument nor the state of the Shards stopped me from copying the Shards and growing my own fixed versions, though, no matter how much I winced every so often as their vitriol got worse or felt like throwing up in my mouth at the pieces of alien hooked up to the Triumvirate’s brains.

Alexandria's Shard was a new kind I'd never seen before. Unlike my, my father's, or the Shaper I copied from Zion by way of Panacea, it had multiple original functions. It served as data storage, a molecular stasis engine, and even had physics manipulation fields like my body's own in it's abilities. Would be a nice backup to what I already had if nothing else.

Legend's was where I hit paydirt. His Shard was the least messed up of all of them. It was, to put it simply, a viable method of moving within real space faster than light. I had my own FTL drive. It allowed me, the Entity me, or any avatar I chose to shift into energy, instantly go from zero to full lightspeed, and then double that speed every minute. His world famously bullshit lasers were just a possible side application of the Shard's true, incredible purpose.

I mentally made a to-do list with my Alexandria Shard to go pay a visit to Alpha Centauri. Grab some pictures.

Then maybe a couple hour trip out to one of the neighborhood galaxies. Wouldn't take me that long.

Yeah, his Shard was bullshit.

Number Man's Shard was just a data cruncher. It analyzed the world and returned numerical patterns. I copied it of course, every single Shard I managed to get would make me more powerful, but I had the feeling I wouldn't be using his Shard much, if at all.

Eidolon's Shard was the most screwed up. However, somehow due to being so fucked up, it was also the most impressive once repaired. It was originally supposed to serve as a Google of sorts for The Thinker. I could use it and fully planned on doing so, but with my meager number of Shards I didn't have multiple powers that could do the same thing a billion different ways like fully grown Entities did. It wouldn't be working anywhere near its real utility level.

Even so, the new Shard was immensely helpful. Already it was taking over the mentally taxing task of figuring out what Shard was useful for which problems I faced in whatever avatar I was using.

What Cauldron had done to its original ended up making it eat another Shard and assimilate it. I grew the two of them out separately as best I could, but my versions would always be intimately linked.

That second, linked Shard? It created and managed ‘Conflict Engines’. I had a sneaking suspicion at that point but it wouldn't be until a little later on that I figured out what that meant.

In the present, the Shard was asking for templates for my first ‘Conflict Engine’.

I didn't really want ‘Conflict Engines’. I went ahead and told it so. It rebuffed that with the idea of ‘Protection Engines’. I was an extremely young and vulnerable Entity, I should have what amounted to guards.

That's what got me to grudgingly agree. And since I was abandoned by my best friend, I thought it ironic if my first one was based on the version of her from before that. The one I grew up with.

My sister in all but blood.

My Shard took that idea and ran with it. Before I could stop it, it searched out and grabbed the connections to the twenty ‘Conflict Engines’ that Eidolon's mutated Shard was barely administering. Now I was the one in control of them.

Then it forwarded a request to the third one. A request for the biodata and a copy of the mind of one Emma Barnes up to just before what it called her trigger event.

If that wasn't enough to shock me stupid, the reply signature on the absolute crapton of data I got back sure did.

[Conflict Engine Three: Cycle Species Designation Simurgh] sat in front of my metaphorical Shard face.

Are you fucking kidding me? I kept repeating to myself.

I was too stunned to even notice, much less stop, the now renamed Protection Engine Shard eating a couple hundred asteroids from my reality. I didn't notice or stop it constructing an Endbringer in the shape and size of my best friend. Didn't see the mind copy get downloaded.

But when she showed up right next to me with a quiet pop, I freaked the hell out. I raised a palm already glowing blue right in her face. Only my high thought speed allowed me to recognize my friend's features in time to not obliterate her.

My Dad and Contessa stopped arguing.

Alexandria and Legend stared at her in disbelief.

Eidolon was nursing a headache due to my seizing of the Endbringers from him.

Doctor Mother was banging her head backwards onto the padded leather headrest of her office chair.

Emma Barnes looked around the briefing room, at me, down at her naked self, at me again, and screamed.

 

Fourth
Chapter 3
Think Again​

"I did what?!"

Emma. My best friend Emma. My sister, Emma.

She was sitting in front of me, clad only in Legend's cape.

It was incredibly unnerving. To everyone else in the room too, but for a very different reason for me.

I'd been tortured by her and Sophia with help from Madison for nearly two years. My sister betrayed me, bullied me, threw everything we'd ever shared back in my face and used it to tear me down.

Emma, my sister, tried to kill me.

She probably would've succeeded, too.

Yet here she was, sitting in front of me with an astonished look on her face, not remembering doing any of that. Her expression was slowly changing into a well of anger so deep I could feel it like a physical thing.

My sister, Emma, was mad at herself.

Oh yeah, and she was also composed of a crystalline structure so redundant and hard to destroy it literally warped spacetime and existed in hundreds of realities at once, but I was putting off any contemplation of the fact I'd created an Endbringer and used my ex-sister to do it.

Also on the checklist was punching Eidolon across the solar system for killing hundreds of millions of people by proxy and a major reckoning for the secret organization that enabled him to do so.

Somewhere on the list of crazy, insane bullshit my life had turned into was flying up into orbit to go talk to the Simurgh.

Yeah. It sounded insane. Still did. Hadn't dropped in insanity levels since I reluctantly put it on my list in the first place.

But…

I had to.

She was now under my command. It was my job. And I'd have to somehow make that fact clear to the world.

Ugh, I'd have to go yell at Behemoth and Leviathan too, just to make it extremely obvious that the attacks were called off.

Huh. This might actually be a good thing. I could get Leviathan and Behemoth to work together, start going around and fixing the places they fucked up.

And the Simurgh was going to be on un-mind-fuck duty for a while.

But right now I had to deal with... Emma.

The Fourth Endbringer, Twenty First Conflict Engine, or First Protection Engine.

Or First Friendbringer.

It really depended on how you looked at the situation, and how much you knew.

At this point I knew everything. First Friendbringer it is.

Oh hey, volcanic rage at Cauldron and the Triumvirate. I wondered why you took so long to bubble up again.

Breathe, Taylor, I coached myself. In and out. Slow. See? All better.

I tuned the Earth Witch reality, and my body contained within it, back into focus. "Yeah," I reluctantly confirmed to answer Emma.

I'd just finished telling her what her original had done to me.

She was not happy.

My Dad probably eclipsed her anger, but he was silently fuming. He hadn't moved at all since I started talking. Neither had the members of Cauldron, though Legend had made a lot of very pained sounds and Alexandria had cracked several pencils into itty bitty pieces.

Emma stared at me with disbelief for several long, tense seconds. I started fidgeting under her gaze.

Hey, I might be an Entity and capable of recreating my body, but it's the one I was born with. I'd rather keep it than be splattered by an Endbringer version of my ex-sister who'd decided to betray me again.

As that thought flowed down my connection to her, Emma's expression darkened. "I'm gonna kill her."

It wasn't a question or a request. She was already standing up and starting to channel my Doormaker Shard to Earth Bet.

"Emma, no!" I commanded, leaning on our connection as much as I could without compromising her.

She paused in her stride. "You're... stopping me?" Emma whirled back to glare at me, confused. "Why won't you let me?!" she asked, astounded. "She... I... She tried to kill you!"

"I'm trying to be the better person, Emma!" I yelled at her.

"Why?!" she shot back. "You could do anything and be a better person than She became!"

"Because I have to!" I fired off. I patted my stomach hard, making tiny sonic booms. "Look at me, Emma, really look. I'm... I'm an Entity now. I have to be the better person because I have the power to wipe out our species! I made you, mostly by accident, like Eidolon made the Endbringers!"

Emma's eyes snapped wide open. Before she could say anything, though, Alexandria spoke up from right behind me. She hadn't even made a sound as she moved.

"What."

I held up a hand to forestall her and make it clear I wasn't talking to her at the moment. "Emma, I on accident co-opted control of the Endbringers," I continued. "On accident asked the Simurgh, the fucking Simurgh, for a copy of Emma, and then on accident created you, using that copy, as another Endbringer!" I listed off what I'd done. "I'm fucking terrified and have to make sure I'm the better person no matter what, because one little moment of weakness, like you've told me I am, like you’ve hammered into my head for the last two years, and I could blow up our planet!"

When I revealed that the young girl in Legend's cape was an Endbringer, everyone except my Dad and oddly enough Contessa tensed. They were preparing for a fight. They were clearly smart enough not to start another one, though, now knowing what my Dad and I were.

I was crying by the end of it, hysterical. I couldn't see out of my body's eyes and my emotions were all over the place.

Emma obviously was connected to more than just my Shard or my idle thoughts, because her furious expression melted. "Oh, Taylor," she said, bringing a hand to her mouth. "I'm so sorry."

Then she blurred forwards and wrapped me up in a hug.

Emma, my sister, was giving me a heartfelt embrace the likes of which I hadn't felt in years.

Love. Someone was giving me love. I… I hadn’t gotten that for two years. Not from anyone. Even my Dad failed, though he tried.

Emma, the one who tortured me, or at least someone who looked like her, sounded like her, smelled like her, felt like her, was hugging me and giving me love.

I was being hugged.

I hadn't been hugged in two years either.

It was all too much for me. I broke down, letting my pain and misery of far more than only two years out in sobs and choked cries. Emma just held me and rubbed my back. She whispered sweet nothings into my ear every so often, mixed in with apologies for what her original had done, and cursing her for throwing me away.

Eventually my Dad joined the hug.

My Dad was hugging me.

Also for the first time in two years.

He must've gestured to somebody because another person joined in, too. A tiny amount of my attention that wasn't eaten up by my emotions noticed it was Contessa.

Guess because she had a piece of my Dad in her head he considered her family.

I wasn't complaining. I was many, many things and feeling all of them at that moment, but I most certainly wasn’t complaining.

I cried in my sister's arms for a long, long time. The fact my Dad had finally pulled his head out of his ass and noticed my suffering was just the cherry on top.

--LB--

I was amazed that the leadership of Cauldron waited, actually patiently waited, for me to stop bawling.

Was it because of my status? What my father and I were? Or were they sympathetic to my plight?

I could probably find out with a Shard or two… but I didn't really want to know. Mysteries would be few and far between for me now. I should take whatever I could get.

My eyes were red when I withdrew from the hug pile. Emma, my sister (but also my first Endbringer, holy shit!) didn't let me go. She clung to me, her chest pressing into my side, and refused to budge when I experimentally pushed on her through our connection.

That was fine. I missed her hugs. Even if they weren't from my original sister, she betrayed me, so having a version of her who literally couldn't was extremely helpful to my emotional state.

It saddened me that it took me making my own version of her to get there, though.

But hey, now we could really be sisters! It's not like this Emma could live at her original’s house after all. Not that she would even if she could, judging by her reactions.

...I made a mental note to not let her go near the Barnes’ without me. She might follow through on her previous threat.

And I'd love to see Dad try and refuse. I was gonna hold him being absent from my life for two years over his head for a long, long time.

Possibly forever.

I might have forgiven him but that didn't mean I wouldn't extort him using it, especially given what exactly he was.

Any and all thoughts about how this Emma, my Friendbringer, was technically my daughter and how that made the other Endbringers my siblings by some weird three way between Eidolon, my Mom, and Scion were firmly ejected from my mind.

Along with the memories of the many, many… ‘educational home videos’ I'd found in the basement a year ago starring my Mom, my Dad, and another stupidly attractive woman.

Videos, yes. Educational? Technically. Deeply, deeply scarring would be my preferred description.

See? They're not in my mind anymore. Nope. Nuh uh. Wasn't Alexandria standing behind me? Oh wait, she went back to sit down after my breakdown.

“Sorry,” I instinctively, automatically apologized. Both for getting lost in thought and for melting like an ice cream cone’s internal confectionary on a hot day.

My eyes widened and I cursed. “No, you know what? No. I'm not sorry. I needed that!” I refused, a little too loudly.

I was refusing more myself than anyone else, but the Triumvirate and my father still flinched.

I didn't apologize, just crossed my arms as much as I could over my new chest and the Emma shaped arms around my torso.

“Taylor,” Alexandria asked hesitantly. She wasn't really a gentle person, but she was trying. “What did you mean when you said you took the Endbringers from Eidolon?”

And just like that, my good mood evaporated.

“Oh, right,” I spat. “That little nugget of crap.”

I turned to Eidolon, previously one of my most worshipped heroes, and death glared him. “Your Shard, due to the butchering all of you did,” with that I indicated everyone in the room except my Dad and Emma, “ate a Shard that creates and administers Conflict Engines. Eidolon here’s subconscious, retarded need for worthy opponents activated Behemoth, and Leviathan, then the Simurgh!” I slammed my hands down on their oak conference table and allowed my copy of Legend's shard to channel blue light into my eyes, making them glow. “I am just a little pissed about my heroes being the cause of millions of deaths!”

Eidolon, Legend, and Doctor Mother's faces went bone white.

“Wh-what?” Eidolon stammered.

I gave him an evil, stinkeyed glare. “Yeah, that's right. Cauldron may have fucked up the Shards, but it was the user who ultimately commanded and, until I seized them barely an hour ago, kept commanding them to attack every three months.” I pointed a finger at Eidolon accusingly. “The blood of millions is on your subconscious head, Eidolon.” I growled his ‘hero’ name, my teeth bared.

The blood drained from his face. “No,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I restated, firmly and resolutely.

My Dad was just watching all of this. He was glaring at Contessa every so often, but otherwise he was doing as he said. Letting me take the lead.

Alexandria scowled. “You have no proof-” she began to defend her friend.

I snapped my glare to her and decided to hammer home just how outclassed she was. I seized control of her Shard and through it, her body. “Sit. Down,” I commanded. I sent the same commands through her Shard.

Alexandria's eyes popped open and she grunted as her body sat without her control.

Everyone else paled suitably. Nobody was making any sudden moves.

“I used to respect you, Alexandria,” I spat her way. “You were my hero. You, more than anyone in the world, I wanted to be like. I ran around with Emma… the betraying one, as a little girl with a cape and pretended to be you. But now...” I looked around at them all, then the ceiling and the ground of the Cauldron base. I met her eyes again, absolutely sure there was disgust on my face. “Now… I'm extremely conflicted.”

Despite her anger at me, every word brought a wince from her.

I turned my angry gaze on the only normal human in the room. The ‘leader’. The so called Doctor. “You, and Cauldron, are gonna have to do a lot to get back on my good side,” I seethed, narrowing my eyes.

I spared Legend a suspicious glance. “You didn't seem to know about what your friends were doing. You're my hope for this shitstorm,” I told him.

The third member of the Triumvirate grimaced. “Am I right in guessing you're not going to help?”

I shook my head. “Not until you clean up your act. I'll keep the Endbringers under control and my Dad and I will see what we can do about Scion. That's it. In exchange for not destroying Cauldron, I want this base.”

Everyone in the room stared at me with stunned shock except Eidolon, who was barely breathing.

“What?” the Number Man asked, blinking.

“This base,” I repeated, gesturing around us. “I want it.”

Everyone was silent for another good ten seconds. Besides Emma giggling into my shoulder and my Dad valiantly containing his mirth, that is.

“You're serious,” Legend finally realized. He swallowed nervously, eyeing his friends.

“Yup.”

That was it. My Dad lost it. “She's got bigger cajones than I do!” he wheezed, trying and failing to breathe through his uncontrolled cackling.

Contessa, resigned to her new duty, whumped him on the back a few times.

It didn't help.

Alexandria glared at me when she got over her shock. “How dare you-”

Legend clamped a hand on her leg. “Don't, Alexandria,” he warned.

“Smart,” I agreed, smirking. I tried to look dangerous over the gigantic red blush on my face from my Dad's comment.

I'm not sure it entirely worked.

Still, even a cute, blushing destroyer of worlds is still a destroyer of worlds.

Doctor Mother was the one who asked. “Why?” Her voice held defeat within it.

“First, and I know you know about this; my mother, presumably, is here,” I began laying out my reasons. “Secondly I think I can help the people who were severely warped by their corrupted Shards. And third? I’ve always wanted a secret base.” The last reason was accompanied by a gigantic, ear to ear grin.

Emma finally lost it. She broke down giggling and bopped me on the nose for doing it to her.

I maintained my serious facade despite it being incredibly hard to do so with my sister giggling right next to me.

The familiarity of that, the memories of her original doing that when we were younger, when we were friends, crashed over me in a tidal wave of pain. But they were good memories, and Emma hugged me tighter when she felt the pain flare across our connection, so I bared it.

--LB--

I gave them a week to move out. I even provided them a temporary portal to one of their secondary… offworld bases, of their own choosing, so they could do it easier.

Is it still called an offworld base if it's just an alternate version of the same planet?

PHO’s various debates on the topic seemed to agree that yes, it was.

That seemed dumb to me, but I couldn't come up with a better alternative than ‘side-world’, so I decided to go with the one that didn't make Emma and my Dad laugh their asses off.

As mad as I was with Cauldron, they were still trying to do the right thing. They were trying to save my species -my previous physical one, anyways, and my mental one- against impossible odds with a malfunctioning guidance system and essentially zero allies.

Across the entire multiverse.

I couldn't lay all the blame on them. There were two others I most definitely could, and did, lay it at the metaphorical feet of, though.

Moreover, Eidolon didn't actually make the Endbringers. He just activated them.

No, that was Eden’s fault. The Thinker.

My mother, apparently.

Oh yeah, once I figured out how to revive her safely, we were gonna have a Talk. A long one. With lots of shouting on my part about not blowing up planets and not making death machines, thanks!

When the hell did the universe invert so that the teenager is more responsible than both her parents?!

Somewhere in another part of my unskillfully multitasked mind, I was continually grumbling. Another part of me was screaming at a metaphorical wall.

The avatar part, my body's thought ‘thread’, I guess you could say, benefited from this by appearing normal.

Threading your mind isn't remotely as easy as science fiction would have us believe. I was still only managing five, max, before I got hopelessly confused.

Of course, I sensed I could do more, but I'd have to abandon parts of what made me human, allowed me to sympathize with my race.

I wouldn't ever do that.

We said our goodbyes. I kept my anger reigned in enough to give each of the Triumvirate a hug. Even Eidolon.

He… didn't really respond much. To me, to his teammates, nothing. I really hoped I hadn't broken him.

I still needed him intact to punt across the solar system after all.

Alexandria looked conflicted for most of it. Sad and angry alternatively. When I hugged her, she initially was surprised, but then held on tight for a long time. I'm pretty sure my comments to her got through. She didn't cry, but I sensed she was close.

As I'd intended. Hopefully she'd come out the other side a better, more compassionate person.

Then I could apologize and we could go soaring into the sunset.

Hey, I'm not gonna just let my dreams be dreams, okay?

Legend bade both of us a hearty goodbye. Said he'd do the best he could. And, extremely politely, asked us not to reveal Cauldron’s existence or actions. To leave it up to him.

I'd always liked him, so I said yes. Tentatively.

They promised to move their HQ in a week. We promised to tackle Scion and my mother. I made it very clear the Endbringers were done attacking places.

Which is why when we stepped out of the Doorway I made back to our house (I was cheating by using that power, according to my Dad) and saw who was waiting for us, or more specifically me, I wasn't exactly happy.

Emma was, though. “Auntie!” she cried out.

She let go of my arm and zipped across the living room far faster than anyone normal should have been able to. She tackle hugged the platinum haired, gray eyed, pale as snow and slender girl about my age with six white feathered wings standing there with a slightly apologetic and definitely sheepish smile on her previously only-ever-recorded-as-solemn face.

Oh yeah, and the two guys standing next to her. Emma hugged both of them, too.

One was a really tall guy, very dark skinned, with dark red, almost orange hair and orange irises.

No shirt.

And oh my gods, the beefcake.

The other guy was similar, if skinny instead of wide. He had an olive skin tone, swim trunks, a sea green theme, and no shirt. Less beefcake, more a swimmer, but still quite muscled.

He was even holding a stereotypical trident.

“Hi sis,” the girl greeted me.

Gods damn it.

My Dad losing his control once again and falling to the floor laughing his ass off just hammered home how much the universe hated me.

 

Fourth
Chapter 4
Family Values​

“You are in so much trouble,” I growled out, crossing my arms.

I was looking straight at Miss Psychic Feathers as I said that. The two boys subtly fidgeted under the bare edges of my gaze.

The Simurgh-

And isn't that a fucking insane thought. The Simurgh is standing in my living room!!!

“Ziz,” she softly spoke.

I blinked. “I'm sorry, what?”

“My name,” she repeated, “is Ziz.”

I narrowed my eyes and glared harder at her. “Funny, I thought you were The Third Endbringer,” I snarled.

She flinched along with her brothers.

“Y-You know the circumstances-” she tried to defend herself.

“Switzerland.”

That one word sent her pathetic attempt at defense to the Ship Graveyard.

I turned my glare on the trident equipped swimmer. “Kyushu.”

His eyes widened and he flinched as well.

Tall Dark and Orange seemed to be expecting my gaze. “Moscow,” he said before I could, his lips set in a grim line of acceptance.

...

With an extremely thick Russian accent.

...Why, why oh why is Behemoth’s accent Russian when he is clearly the opposite skin tone?

Not that there aren't darker skinned people in Russia. But the kind of accent assaulting my ears was pretty much only ever found in the pasty white, bearded vodka drinking, dancing, singing, Russians.

I sighed in pain and closed my eyes. “Yes,” I breathed in, then out, to try and relax.

It didn't really help, but I tried.

When I met The Simurgh’s… Ziz’s eyes again, my gaze wasn't heated anymore. Just weary.

She pursed her lips and let out a little shrug. “Sorry.”

“Sorry doesn't bring the people who died back,” I hesitantly fielded.

The three siblings looked incredibly defeated. Ziz had unshed tears in her eyes. Levi, because I'm not calling him Leviathan in my head, fidgeted nervously and guiltily.

“We know this,” Behemoth… no, frak that, he is now called Ben -short for Benjamin- because I can't even think his old name with a straight face, solemnly lamented.

“And? So?” I pressed on despite the feelings of regret surging up their connections to me, “What are you… what are we going to do about it?”

“Become… heroes?” Levi hazarded a guess.

I blinked as the building drive to communicate to them just how unhappy I was evaporated.

Levi sounded like an actual teenager.

No, more than that, he sounded like Greg.

…

That thought was just too terrifying. Mental note; they must never, ever meet.

“You want… to be heroes?” I asked incredulously.

Ziz nodded emphatically. “Yes, yes, please! I feel so terrible and it's just…” she held a wing (not a hand, those were still holding Emma) to her heart. Or where her heart would be. “Guilt sucks. A lot,” she finished, muttering.

My eyebrows rose all on their own. An Endbringer feeling guilt? Moreover, feeling in the first place?

What the hell did my new Shard do?!

Query it for an explanation aaaaand-

Oh.

They're Protection Engines now.

Ziz even has a heart!

That was just a gods damned figure of speech!

And so do Ben, Levi, and Emma.

Crystalline, sure, like their bodies were before, but still. The rest of their bodies were carbon (heh) copies of a human one, also in crystal. Their various additions like Ziz's wings… and Levi’s tail?! notwithstanding.

...

What in the he-

...Is there a button, somewhere, to keep the damn pieces of me from doing things of their own accord?!

The Shard-which-was-in-very-hot-water-with-me let out the Shardspeak equivalent of a skittish ‘meep' and started throwing random bits of data on what it had already done my way.

It was trying to distract me from my very present state of mind intent on taking it's code apart to see whether a Shard could scream.

And damn it, this stuff is still too cool to me for the distraction to fail.

I narrowed my metaphorical eyes at the Shard and informed it that while it had appeased me this time, it'd better shape up and follow my rules.

I wasn't Eidolon. I wasn't going to just sit back and not run things.

Another meep accompanied suspiciously anthropomorphic, rapid head nodding.

My eyes narrowed further.

I was not aware a Shard could relay the concept of an innocent, angelic smile. Now I am.

All of this took barely a second of thought time. I rejoined realtime in my body a moment later, back to musing about the Endbringer's request.

I sighed and threw my hands up to the ceiling. “Fine, fine!” I acquiesced. “We can be heroes.”

And that is when I got tackle hugged by three Endbringers and my sister.

My dad didn't stop laughing for hours.

I will get him back for this. I so swear vengeance.

---

After the Endbringers’ hard-fought victory against the stifling sensibilities of yours truly, I was unanimously outvoted on the topic of what we were doing next.

Getting ice cream.

At the Boardwalk.

In public.

Do you know how nerve-wracking it is to traipse through a city like Brockton Bay with four engines of Destruction Protection trailing along behind you like ducklings following their mother?

I do! It's very nerve-wracking!

I sighed again and rubbed the bridge of my nose. For some odd reason, I was getting a premonition that I would be doing that a lot.

Oh wait, no, it wasn’t for an odd reason. It was because my version of Path to Victory, the best precog Shard in existence, was informing me based on the data it had gathered so far about my personality type that I would be doing so.

Every. Time.

Every time my new… Kids? Siblings? Cousins? Whatever our relationship is, every time they did something that annoys me, or makes me panic or, or worries me, I would have the urge to rub my frustrations out on my nose bridge.

“Rocky Road is the best!” Ziz said, smiling at me.

Oh yes.

Ziz likes Rocky Road.

I’d think she chose that just to mess with me if I didn't know that she couldn't see me with her precognition Shards.

No, no, the Engine of Destruction Protection that regularly sets up Rube Goldberg-esque series of events on a worldwide scale using her temporal precog to fuck things up likes Rocky Road ice cream naturally.

Ziz felt my incredulous opinion of her ice cream choice and stuck her tongue out at me.

The thought/feeling transfer thing was taking a lot of time to get used to. I still wasn't totally okay with it even after hours of it being active. I could shut it off, that was in my power, but...

Look, I'd been exiled from society, exiled from friends, tortured, for two years of high school. I clung to that feeling link like a lifeline.

Emma felt my despair and hugged me. Hard. And yet soft at the same time. “It's okay Taylor, we're not gonna let that happen again,” she assured me.

She was sitting next to me expressly so she could do that. I didn't yet fully trust the Endbringers despite knowing that they couldn't even think of hurting me now. it was part of their directives. They were Protection Engines. Meant to protect…

Me.

Still, 15 years of fearing them doesn't exactly go away in less than 24 hours.

I'd get there. Eventually.

As much as I knew it hurt them, I also knew that they understood. They'd give me the time I needed and try to be supportive as much as they could be.

Ziz smiled sardonically at me and slowly licked her ice cream off her spoon.

Yes, I was being teased by the the Simurgh.

Path to Victory also informed me that I would eventually be quite immune to all forms of bullshit.

“Indeed. We are to protect you.” Ben was eating his orange ice cream slowly, methodically, savoring its taste and texture. Apparently he couldn't eat before, unlike Levi and Ziz, so… Yeah. Slow and steady wins the race? Is there even a race?

Levi certainly thought so. he had attacked his mint chocolate chip vanilla ice cream like a kid at Christmas. He was already on his eighth bowl!

I would have thought Ben to be the heavy eater but, nope! Lizard boy is apparently the hungriest.

Also, turns out they can hide their Endbringer features. Ben doesn't really have any to hide, but Levi's tail and Ziz’s wings shrink back into their bodies, leaving them looking nearly entirely human. Keep in mind the trip through the city, on a bus no less (no way could all six of us fit in Dad’s truck) was nerve-racking to me even with this, so one can kind of understand just how much could possibly go wrong.

I haven't even gotten to have the talk with them about what to do if someone attacks me yet. I'm not really interested in finding out what happens when four Endbringers, no longer sandbagging, with a directive to protect someone, are right in front of the person who attacks what they're meant to be protecting.

I don't think it will go very well, to put it lightly.

I was still poking at my bowl of pistachio. I had a whole bunch of Shards managing my emotions and yet... it was very difficult, internally at least, to get over what the Trio had done to me.

I wasn't sure I'd ever get over it.

My Dad was cheerily eating his vanilla ice cream and chatting with Ziz. When she wasn't talking to me, that is. Yes, my dad and the gods damned Simurgh were chatting.

If my surrealism meter hadn't already been maxed out when I confronted my childhood hero it would probably have a few additional points in it.

Then there's the blonde, light-skinned girl sitting next to her large, dark-skinned friend, staring at me in horror across the ice cream shop-

Wait a second.

I slowly turned my head to look at her. I swear I didn't mean to make it creepy but it ended up being very creepy. Evidenced by the fact her eyes widened and she started trembling.

Okay. Quick recap.

Four Endbringers and two Entities walk into a bar ice cream shop. They sit down, order ice cream, and start eating it. They all look like humans from external observation. Well, except for Ziz’s naturally pale skin and hair, Levi's blue hair, and Ben's orange eyes… actually yeah no that's, that's weird, nevermind.

Okay, so the girl saw some of our abnormalities. So what? We were still probably human. Maybe Ziz and Levi have their hair dyed and Ben is wearing contacts. Dad and I both looked entirely human, even if I'd made my body more attractive, so…

What was going on?

Why was the girl who was previously looking at me in horror now laughing at me and trying to hide it behind her hands instead?

I scowled at her and sent a litany of scanning Shards her coordinates.

...Oh.

Okay, now it all makes sense.

Sarah Livsey over there, sometimes known as Tattletale or always known as Lisa Wilborn, is a villain.

With a Shard named Inference Engine.

A Shard which, for some reason, didn’t register me as an Entity.

That meant that all the limiters built into most Shards to prevent them from being used against their creators were completely gods damned useless to protect me.

That's just great!

For some reason, a little hunch, I imagined shit was about to go down.

I hastily grabbed Emma and Ben's arms, using my new strength to anchor them to their seats. I death glared Levi and Ziz so they wouldn't move. Of course the strength of this body wouldn't have stopped them if they really tried, I hadn't turned my body into a crystalline construct with the mass of a neutron star, but it signified commands from me, so they listened.

“We talk to her first,” I flatly declared.

Ziz pouted at me. Emma would’ve too, but she seemed to be more human than the other three.

“Talk. First.”

Ziz huffed and crossed her arms. “Fine,” she grumbled.

“No mental tampering either,” I pressed her.

She rolled her eyes at me. “I only do that to bad people now,” she informed me, allowing a little bit of the guilt inside her to spill through her eyes. “Believe it or not, she's a good person. Not all villains are evil, or have a choice.”

I was surprised to say the least. I raised my eyebrows at Ziz, saw her confirming nod, then turned to look at Sarah and oh my gods she's right there.

She was standing at the end of our table, grinning. Smugly. Her… boyfriend? stood behind her with his arms crossed over his chest, attempting to look intimidating.

I was eating ice cream with four Endbringers. He'd have to try a lot harder.

Scratch that, three Endbringers and a giggling, winged moron. Ziz was laughing at my reaction to Sarah's sudden presence.

My lack of amusement with her only made Ziz giggle harder.

The blonde started to open her mouth, but I was now in constant contact with her Shard. Which, by the way, was positively enamored to receive so much new data. It was also having a similar reaction to meeting me as fans do meeting a celebrity. I… wasn't quite sure how I felt about that.

Anyways, I knew how much damage Tattletale could do if she spoke.

“Think very carefully before you open your mouth, Sarah,” I told the blonde, locking eyes with her. “They only stay their hands because of me.”

Sarah's face darkened as she scowled at me. “How do you know that name?”

Her boyfriend jumped at that and looked at her wearily. “Wait, what does she mean, Lisa?” he asked. Dude was smart, I'll give him that. He was starting to catch on.

The blonde sighed, closed her eyes, and clenched a fist. She spun around while simultaneously opening her hand and smiling at him. “Brian, my old name was Sarah, okay? But we can't do this right now, because she knows who we are.” She pointed back towards me with an accusing finger.

I corrected her with a clear throat. “ Actually I only know a little bit about you, Sarah,” I informed her. “Specifically that you are a parahuman, you have a Shard named Inference Engine, your power is to find information like a, in your words, overpowered Sherlock Holmes, and your cape name is Tattletale.”

There wasn't an ounce of smugness in my voice from turning this girl’s normal gimmick back on her. Nope.

Not. An. Ounce.

She spun around on me again and glared at me. “I don't know what the hell a Shard is, but stop copying me.”

Brian's eyebrows rose the same moment I donned a confused look. I had that look because I was confused. Copying? What the hell was she talking abo-

Ohhh.

She thought I'm a Power Copying Trump.

Because that's what her Shard told her.

I'm pretty sure her Shard was just as much of a smartass as she was. And- actually, yep, my Queen Administrator ‘memories’, if you could call them that, told me I was 100% correct.

Sure, in the most technical sense, that is what I was. And apparently her Shard had noticed my irritation with it using a loophole to bypass the normal restrictions on Entities with me. In the interests of not further pissing me off, so it could get more data from me, it decided to toe the line. While messing with its host at the same time.

Got to admit, I can respect that. It's not exactly clear whether the attitude of both of them is because the host imprinted on the Shard or because the Shard imprinted on the host. It's possible both of them did.

Inference Engine could not have possibly gained a more suited host for it than this girl.

I smiled at her and slightly scooted over. Emma scooted along with me. I pat the seat of the ice cream shop booth with a hand to invite Sarah to sit down.

She scowled at me. Aaagain.

I rolled my eyes and pat the seat once more. “Trust me, you're going to want to be sitting down for what I have to tell you.”

She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously, but slowly, very slowly, began to sit down.

“Lisa! Err, Sarah!” Brian said, his arms slightly uncrossing as his mouth dropped open. “What the hell are you doing?”

“She's a power copying Trump, Brian,” she answered him, still looking at me. “We're boned either way.”

Brian's eyes positively popped out of his head. “What?!”

I gestured to my Dad, Ziz, and Ben to scoot over and make a little room for Brian. This would only end up leaving him enough room to put a single leg down, but it would have to be enough. without even questioning it, the three of them did it, though Ziz sent me a dirty look because she had to move her ice cream.

Tattletale sat.

Brian sent me a scathing look. I just smiled angelically and gestured for him to sit down again, nodding to try and reassure him.

Brian Laborn, Grue, sat as well. He was not exactly happy about it however.

Actually, looking at them, Brian and Ben are spitting images of each other. Like, twins.

And I like muscley men.

I sent another suspicious metaphorical glance at my Protection Engine Shard.

It metaphorically pointed at Path to Victory.

She, and it could only be a she given her feel, smirked knowingly.

Was being part of me changing these Shards to be more human?

My sneaking suspicion was yes. Either that, or their responses were being filtered into something I could interpret as a human, and so I was reverse humanizing them.

Or it's Shard fuckery. That was entirely possible. I’ll question it later when doing so didn't give me a migraine on top of the headache I already had.

I smiled at them, then pushed my pistachio ice cream to the side so I could put my hands together and clasp them. “All right, Brian, Sarah,” I began, looking at both of them in turn, “what I'm going to tell you is very hard to believe. I have proof, but even with that you still might think I'm crazy.”

Brian just scoffed and shook his head.

Sarah, on the other hand, visibly fought her automatic look of interest. “I've discovered some pretty unbelievable things,” she refuted.

I shook my head and grinned. “Trust me, this, you haven't. I would be very surprised if you found out anything of this magnitude.”

Sarah let Tattletale’s trademark smirk emerge, completely having lost her battle. “All right then hot stuff,” she dared, “show me what you got.”

And she was egging me on.

I no longer felt any sympathy for her given she had just literally asked for it. I mirrored her trademark smirk and furrowed my eyebrows so I could look Maximum Evil™. “You know how the Endbringers disappeared today?” I nonchalantly asked.

My four Protection Engines immediately perked up at this. Ben stopped meticulously eating his ice cream and set his spoon down… also meticulously. Levi kind of half dropped his hands and kept eating out of the bowl. Emma hugged me, Ziz grinned, and my Dad had literal eye sparkles to match his knowing smile.

[You're giving me that Shard,] I informed him.

[Sure.]

[And I will call it the Dumbledore Shard.]

Freaking out the two non mentally connected people in the room was totally worth making my Dad splutter as he tried to conceal his laughter.

[Sure thing, Little Owl,] he agreed, his laughter echoing in my head.

I shared a grin with him and turned back to look at Sarah.

Sarah blinked at the our exchange, frowned as if she was trying to figure it out, visibly got a Thinker headache, and then shook her head. “Oww,” she complained.

“Don't try to read our minds, Sarah,” I warned her.

She scoffed and rubbed her forehead. “Yeah no kidding. Thanks for warning me ahead of time, jackass.”

“I shouldn't need to warn you not to try and read people's minds Sarah.”

She began to respond, found she had no counter, and closed her mouth. “Point.”

“Anyways,” I repeated myself, “about the Endbringers?”

Sarah tilted her head as she remembered the complete, she assumed anyways, non sequitur. “Uh, yeah?” she flatly stated. “The beings that decided to cause even more chaos than they normally do by up and disappearing, which they knew would make us run around like a kicked anthill without them having to lift a finger?”

The three previous Endbringers barely hid their snickers.

“They didn't exactly... disappear,” I informed her and Brian at the same time.

“What.” That was Brian. Hissing like a snake.

Sarah's eyebrows almost hit orbit with the speed they jumped off her face.

I'm obviously exaggerating, they didn't jump off her face, but they should’ve!

“Yeah like Brian said,” she echoed, “What.”

I merely smiled and gestured to the occupants of the table.

Sarah's eyes widened as it finally clicked for her. She visibly gulped and slowly turned her head to look at the person sitting directly across from her.

Ziz.

My winged Friendbringer raised a hand and shyly waved at her. Her back sprouted wings, just a little bit, in order to show Sarah that they were there.

Brian was sitting right next to her. When he felt those wings touch his back, he let out a primal roar of surprise and rocketed off the booth seat.

“The Simurgh,” Sarah whispered in horror.

“H-hi,” the third Endbringer nervously stammered.

Sarah gulped again, even louder, turning her gaze on Levi. “Leviathan.”

Brian was completely and totally speechless. His face was actually a little gray, which was incredibly surprising given his skin tone. That shouldn't have been possible. Was he going to faint?

Levi just momentarily lowered his bowl of ice cream, looked at Sarah, and nodded his head upward. “Sup.” A moment later he was once again chowing down.

Sarah looked dead on the inside, her eyes unfocused. Trembling, she turned to Ben and gulped a third time.

“Behemoth.” She didn't stutter, she didn't have a questioning tone. She was 100% certain.

“Greetings,” Tall Dark and Orange answered her with a slow, respectful nod. In his still very thick Russian accent.

Welp, there went Brian. I motioned to Ziz to go pick him up. And to stow her wings.

She was trying so hard to do things right, she followed my request without even token resistance.

Sarah didn't even notice. “Eheheh,” she whimpered. Her eyes turned to my Dad. Her head didn't move. I wasn’t sure if anyone was even home inside her head anymore. “So, what are you?” she asked accusingly.

I guess the human brain can only take so much bullshit before they break. I'm glad I don't have one with that kind of limit anymore.

Or am I just naturally immune to bullshit? Hmm, something to research later.

Dad smiled at her, kindly, but also a little dangerously. He was having way too much fun with this. “I'm Abaddon,” he informed her. His voice painted a picture of just how much it was no big deal.

Sarah nodded rapidly and turned her eyes to look at me. “And your Endbringer name?”

I raised an eyebrow in confusion. “Endbringer name?” I asked her.

She narrowed her eyes at me incredulously. “Yeah,” she deadpanned. “You're all Endbringers. I just need to know what name I should scream out in terror before you kill me.”

Man this girl was good at discussing horrible things as if they were normal. Her voice only fluctuated a little when she said I would kill her.

I blinked and started chuckling under my breath.

Sarah's face paled. “Oh G-God, why are you laughing?!”

I kept chuckling and reached out my hand to steady myself on her shoulder. “Sarah, Sarah,” I chided, getting ready to correct her. “My Dad and I aren't Endbringers.”

“WELL WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THEN?!”

Now I was having way too much fun with this. I grinned widely at her. In fact, I would describe my grin as shit eating. “We’re members of the species that make them.”

At that her face drained of all its remaining blood.

“And powers,” I quickly added on.

Sarah Livsey, Lisa Wilborn, Tattletale, joined her teammate Grue in the land of lost consciousness.

I frowned even as Ziz started to giggle and Levi snickered. “Well that was disappoint-”

And the ice cream shop exploded.

---

A/N: I'm back! Thanks to Amacita for proofreading this. Side note, voice recognition typing is a whole lot faster but really, really dislikes proper capitalization.

 

Fourth
Chapter 5
Relative Gifts​

[Data]

That was one of my Shards. What the hell did it want?

And why was my head hurting so much?

Like, shit, that explosion was so powerful it knocked my body connection offline for a good few seconds and sent my mind reeling from the-

Oh fuck. An explosion!

[Data]

[Not now!]

My eyes shot wide open as I fully contemplated what the last moments of disorientation made me incapable of noticing.

First off, the ice cream shop had been hit by an explosion powerful enough to give my pseudo-Kryptonian body dizziness, disorientation and a migraine.

Actually, there's no second, that was pretty much the root cause of all the following points on my What The Fuck Just Happened?! list.

My surroundings looked like they’d been hit by a bomb. There was basically nothing left but charred masonry, burnt seats and the smell of ash-coated evaporated ice cream in the air. The stores nearby were flattened, and I could see through the pavement of the Boardwalk to the Bay below it. The few places still standing were at the very edges of the formerly pristine tourist attraction of the city.

And there were no bodies. Anywhere.

It was surprising, given the extent of the damage, but it also gave me a little bit of hope. A tiny smidgen of helpful feelings that whatever had attacked us hadn’t killed innocent bystanders in doing so.

Oh come on, you really think whatever hit the ice cream shop, devastating the entire Boardwalk, wasn’t after us? Four Endbringers and two gods damned Entities?! It was after us, no question.

What was under question was just how hard whatever hit us wanted to die. Again, four Endbringers and two Entities. You don’t attack that unless you have a death wish.

“Taylor!” I heard, barely, as if the sound was swimming through molasses to get to me.

“Wuh?” was my highly sophisticated response. I blinked the dust that had apparently gotten into my eyes out of them and trained my gaze upon whoever was trying to talk to me.

[Data!]

Whatever Shard kept sending me data was really starting to get on my nerves.

Ziz was standing in front of me with one hand extended towards me, as if to help, and the other… clutching a still knocked out Brian.

What the hell man, an explosion isn't enough to wake you from a dead faint?

I shook my head at him in exasperation, sighing. Enough lazing about.

[DATA!]

Then I was floating in the air, hair flowing behind my back, and I called on my powers seriously for perhaps the first time.

If this was Scion, my Dad and I were gonna have a hell of a fight on our hands. Abaddon couldn't beat the Warrior in a full on battle, he just wasn't massive enough, and in an Entity slugfest that was ultimately what it came down to without some special Shard shenanigan fuckery to level the playing field-

[DATA!!!]

Ouch!

A massive migraine sprung out of nowhere. I collapsed back to the ruined ice cream shop floor, groaning in pain, and began rapidly scanning my Shards to see which one of the uppity fuckers sent me so much junk data that it overloaded the Shard literally designed to handle fucktons of the stuff.

Oh. Of course. The little shit was going to get it.

[Protection Engine Administrator, why the hell are you yelling at me?! You're on thin ice as it is!] I bellowed at it. Are Shards terminally stupid or something? I had begun to think mine were becoming more intelligent just by being exposed to me, especially Protection Engine Administrator -actually, scratch that, I was now going to call it PEA- but apparently not!

The Shard cringed at my anger, but nevertheless repeated itself. For the umpteenth time, as well. [DATA!] it sent.

What? Another Engine was activated? Why?!

And shit, [Which one?]

[Data]

Oh, just the one that can control the flow of time.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

[You'd better have a good explanation for this, PEA] I metaphorically growled at the piece of me which couldn't take a hint.

“It does,” Ziz spoke up, drawing me out of my internal dialogue.

“What, not being able to stop doing shit without my say?” I asked her sarcastically.

“No,” she countered by taking the hand she'd offered me and pointing over her shoulder, which now that I paid attention revealed she had her wings deployed, “that.”

I looked over her shoulder and my jaw dropped.

Standing in the street outside the shop was what looked like a living explosion. In the vague shape of a humanoid.

The Ash Beast, here, in America? Hell, in Brockton Bay?!

Well that explained what happened to the Boardwalk.

Worrying about what the hell was going on given the fact it's last known location was Africa would have to come later.

Because… Ben was chewing on its head.

“What. The. Fuck,” I eloquently stated.

“It gets better,” Ziz said, pointing out what I'd missed on my initial glance.

Namely that Ben wasn't chewing.

Oh don't get me wrong, his mouth was around a portion of the humanoid explosion's head, and his teeth were elongated much like his previous form’s had been, and he was obviously in the process of gnawing on the explosion…

But he wasn't moving. Neither was the explosion. And they were both grayscale, along with a sizeable bubble of the space around them.

All because a little girl, with pink/gray highlighted, braided pigtails, and wearing a painfully bad imitation of an Asian female school uniform (it even had a huge pink bow on the chest and a skirt!) was standing in front of the two of them, hands outstretched, biting her extended tongue.

My Shard sense designated her [Khonsou].

A Protection Engine with what looked an awful lot like the infamous Gray Boy's power on steroids, crossed with Clockblocker’s stasis ability, and with some actual temporal manipulation involved.

Side note, PEA must think that Khonsou is an Asian girl's name given her absurd clothing.

I wearily turned my gaze back to Ziz and sighed. “She's the fourth one, isn't she,” I grumbled.

“Fifth, Emma's fourth,” she responded sweetly.

Grinning.

I screwed up my gaze at her and glared. “Believe it or not, I'm not amused by any of this.”

She shrugged her wings (How? HOW do you shrug wings?!) and hefted Brian higher up her other arm.

I groaned, got up, and dragged a hand down my face. “Is everyone alright?” I asked, looking around the thoroughly ruined and surprisingly empty ice cream shop. “Where's my Dad? Sarah? Levi? Emma?”

“In order; Everyone except Brian here is safe because Abad-” she cut herself off at my abrupt glare, “sorry, Danny, shunted his avatar and them somewhere else just in time, Sarah's with him and still unconscious, Levi is mourning the loss of his tenth bowl,” she lamented about her brother while pointing to the sea of tears around the familiar lizard boy sobbing on the shop's floor and cradling a singed, empty bowl of what used to be ice cream, “and Emma's fighting The Thief’s current host.”

I snapped my gaze to Ziz again at that last part. “I'm sorry what? The Thief?” I sputtered with surprise. “And Emma's fighting?!”

Ziz blinked at me, tilting her head in confusion. “Of course. She is the most powerful of us,” she ‘reasoned’.

Yes, that was apparently reason for her.

I was completely dumbfounded. Emma? Strongest of the Endbringers? My Shard senses showed that my face was most definitely mirroring my abject disbelief.

“You have not limited her to her own Shards,” Ziz frankly explained.

Oh. Oh shit.

I, or rather my QA memories, knew what that meant. Emma had access to me. All of my Shards, save my core ones, she had permission to use.

That explained why I felt like I'd run a marathon, at least.

“Okay, ignoring whether I'll continue to let her do that in the future,” I remarked, “where exactly is she and… The Thief?”

Ziz merely pointed down the street outside the blown up shop with one of her primary wings.

“Thanks,” I said. “Keep faint boy here safe, Ziz.”

Ziz took her free hand and snapped off a textbook perfect stereotypical salute.

I smiled grimly her way, lifted into the air, and channeled my Alexandria Shard into boosting my body's own physics manipulation field.

One second I was floating in front of my winged Protection Engine.

The next I was just gone.

While my body couldn't hear it, my Shards picked up the sonic crack I left as I not only broke the sound barrier, but also made it cry for its mother.

I freely admit I celebrated my first real flight.

“YEEAAAAHHHHHHHH!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I barreled down the street so fast everything else seemed frozen. A turbulence equivalent to the backwash of a fighter jet followed in my wake as I rapidly closed in on the near frozen form of Emma and…

Was that the Butcher?

But Ziz had called her The Thief’s host, so...

Sooo, so! The Butcher’s Shard must be called The Thief!

I can in fact do detective work while flying!

Good to know!

I was gonna kick his a-

Wait, I thought the Butcher was a guy?

I momentarily eyed the chest I’d have been jealous of before remodeling my body.

She was not a guy.

This must be a new host.

Either way, I was gonna kick her ass. Well… finish kicking it, anyways.

Man, she did not look good. Her clothes were almost entirely burnt off, her hair was singed, what looked like the remnants of a bow that had been literally frozen over was anchored to her back by ice, and there was a spreading bruise on her stomach.

Just how hard did Emma hit her?!

I slammed into her just as she was about to teleport out of Emma's reach. My fourth Protection Engine was trying to… touch her, for some reason.

Query which Shards she was trying to access annnd-

Oh, nice choice, Emma. That one was nasty. If she got hit with that, she was gonna get to feel what an induced neuromuscular overload is like.

Somewhere in my thought threads I pondered on just how blase I was taking all this.

Yes, I was an Entity with literally five Endbringers within a mile of my avatar, but I still should be even a tiny bit worried.

Oh. Emotion management Shards. Uh, thanks, Dad? Even though giving me those kinda sent mixed messages. Did he think I was emotionally unstable ooooor… what.

Whatever. Figure that out later. For now I got to watch as I dropped out of my acceleration and the Butcher’s current host broke the sound barrier on her trip through one of the few still standing Boardwalk shops.

That shop then spontaneously collapsed on top of her.

Uh... whoops.

“Oh, Taylor!” Emma cheerfully greeted me, having noticed my presence. “Come to join the party?”

Oh my gods. She was actually enjoying this. Her smile widened even further when I realized that.

“Yep. This is fun! Just like back when we pretended to be capes, but better!”

I opened my mouth to rebuke her, but found nothing with which to do so. Yeah, it was the other Emma who'd done that, but this one remembered it, felt as if she had, and most importantly, didn't betray me and try to kill me via toxic locker.

“Yeah, okay,” I reluctantly admitted, allowing a small smile to crack my unamused facade, “this is actually kinda cool.”

“YOU'RE DEAD, BITCH!” a woman's voice screamed with rage.

I intentionally slowed the rate at which I turned my head to look at the severely battered Butcher. She took the insult as I intended it, snarled, and rushed at me with her hands extended like claws.

Then she teleported right into my face and tried to scratch my eyes out.

See, unlike Alexandria, I'm an Entity. That means I have total control over what limits are set in any given one of my Shards’ interactions with the world. Including what my Earth calls the Manton Limit.

When someone punches Alexandria, she isn't hurt, but neither is the attacker. The kinetic energy is just bled off into another reality.

When I took a deeper look at my copy of Alexandria's Shard back at the Cauldron base, soon to be my base, I decided it would be rather interesting to see the effects of reflecting any incoming force upon my body.

Ironically, doing it that way was less of a violation of Newton's Third Law than how Alexandria's Shard works. In the absence of alternate reality shunting, a truly invincible object should reflect all forces applied to it. The energy has to go somewhere, and what better vector than right back where it came from?

I freely admit that the amount of satisfaction the Butcher's shocked expression gave me as she discovered my eyeballs to be tougher than diamonds when her nails and fingers pulped against them was very, very high.

“AAAAGGHHHHH!” she screamed, falling back from me and cradling her hands to her chest.

Wait a second, isn’t he- she supposed to be pain and damage proof? Or does that just not work against Entities?

I shrugged. Oh well. Another thing to figure out later.

“Didn't your mother ever tell you not to pick on somebody bigger than you?" I asked the bleeding woman, leaning over and staring her in the face.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU?!”

I got down on my knee and rested an arm on it. I used the other arm’s hand to grip her chin and tilt her head up so I could look her in the eyes.

“I'm the bigger fish,” I informed her, and the Shard cluster I could sense behind her brain’s trans-reality portal.

Turns out the Butcher, The Thief, was a burgeoning Entity. One that had committed far too many crimes for me to give it any leeway.

I gripped her chin tighter, almost painfully, and directed the might of my Shards across realities. Even with Queen Administrator being my core, I was taking a chance here. I'd been able to control Zion Shards because I still had their access codes, for the most part. The Eden Shards I'd encountered treated me like their owner in the first place, and something about me being Abaddon’s daughter made the original Path to Victory not even try to keep me out.

The Thief? Either it was a Zion Shard gone horribly, horribly Rogue, so far off the deep end that it didn't answer to the codes I contained anymore…

Or it was a Shard from none of them. It didn’t come from Eden.

I’d have remembered it if it did.

I wasn't sure which possibility was the right one, but it didn't really matter. I still had to fight this thing for control.

Or… not.

Five seconds after making contact with the Thief’s host, I was the proud owner of fifteen new, deprogrammed Shards.

That wasn't a very long battle. What the hell?

The Thief was young, very young (as an Entity anyways), and only amounted to fifteen shards. I now had over sixty, and I was Queen Administrator. It was my true self.

Even so, five seconds?!

I looked deep within myself, examined the code with which I had just taken fifteen Shards over, and blanched.

My consciousness resided in a Shard literally designed to control, command, and as I just discovered, usurp other Shards.

Just like the virus Shard my Dad made to take her out, I was Eden's superweapon.

Shit.

Wait a second, wasn’t my Shard created by Zion?

This was actually kinda important. I tuned out the entire rest of the universe and dove even deeper into myself than I’d done before.

After doing the mental equivalent of dissociation, I found the answer. It was buried so far inside me that I’d have never found it if I wasn’t looking. And no other Shard, Entity, or otherwise would’ve been able to find it. The fact I was even capable of thinking of myself as Eden’s Superweapon was a glitch due to my human mind.

Queen Administrator was originally Eden’s. Or, well, [The Thinker]’s, but whatever let me understand Shardspeak insisted on calling her Eden, thus why I referred to her as such most of the time.

That fact was hidden behind a network of fake Entity signatures almost impossibly dense. I didn’t know why Eden made my core Shard tell everyone, including itself, that Zion was it’s creator, but the deception was part of me, and more importantly, was capable of hiding parts of me from me. I had a Master effect that worked on me built in.

I couldn’t let that stand. But I was also kinda busy at the moment, so...

Compartmentalize it Taylor, I coached myself, attempting to breathe smoothly and not with sheer terror at the implications of my new discoveries, deal with it later.

It worked. Sort of. I could focus on other things, at least.

Like the fact that each of my new Shards had a human personality stored inside of it.

Interesting. I’d have to investigate them later. I kind of had other problems going on.

Namely the living explosion frozen in time at the epicenter of what amounted to a crater in the middle of the Boardwalk.

I waved a hand at the host of The Thief’s primary Shard for appearance’s sake, utilizing my matter manipulation Shard to repair her fingers. She hissed at the sudden lack of pain from her extremities and locked eyes with me from her position on the ground.

A huge smile was on her face and tears streamed down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered. “The-the voices are gone.”

I shook my head at her. “Not gone, just not crazy anymore,” I refuted. “And under new management.” I bent down again and held her cheek, this time softly, attempting to comfort her. “We will need to talk later, but for now, just rest.”

The terror of Boston nodded rapidly and allowed her sobbing to take hold of her as she curled up into the fetal position on the ground.

“Emma,” I called to my sister, “please take her home, then come back.”

“Okay Taylor!” Emma happily followed my request. She stepped up to the trembling form of The Thief's host, picked her up as if she was as heavy as a pillow, then stepped into an orange portal she directed my Doormaker Shard to open between the Boardwalk and my house.

The portal closed behind them.

I waited for a minute or so, but Emma didn't return.

[Emma?] I sent her.

[Yeah?] she replied.

[You going to come back?]

[In a little bit. I need to get Quarrel situated.]

Quarrel, huh? That has to be a cape name. [Ah,] I sent back, [carry on.]

[Will do!]

Okay, so Emma was busy. That was fine. I had to go see a pink haired Protection Engine about a living explosion anyways.

Breaking the sound barrier the second time was just as much fun.
“WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

---

I came out of what I labeled superspeed right next to my newest Protection Engine.

My earlier assessment of her stature as ‘little’ was certainly accurate. I was a tall girl, yes, but she barely came up to my stomach. Gods, she even looked a little shorter than Brockton Bay’s space warping ward, Vista.

I metaphorically stared at PEA once more, making the Shard fidget. Metaphorically. I think. Either way, Khonsou was suspiciously cute.

Before I could say anything to her, her head snapped straight to me and she grinned widely. “Hai! Konichiwa, Taylor-senpai!” Khonsou said happily.

What.

I blinked, rubbed my ears, and blinked again.

Nope. I had indeed heard what I had thought I’d heard. In an absurdly adorable, slightly Japanese accented voice.

[Laying it on a little thick, PEA,] I sent The Shard responsible for all of this.

The Shard sent the Shardspeak equivalent of a smug grin.

“You're not Japanese. Why are you talking like that?” I grumbled, only somewhat complaining. She was just… so, so cute! There’s not many other ways to describe the feeling of needing to coo over her incessantly that was growing in my chest- dammit, that was probably the point of her appearance in the first place!

She looked confused. “I- I am!” she insisted.

“You're a Protection Engine. Technically you were just born. Here,” I pointed out. “In America.”

Not that there aren’t any Japanese people born in America. The ABB’s membership proved otherwise even if common sense didn't. We had taken on a whole lot of refugees when Levi sunk Kyushu after all.

Oh hey there, guilt over the actions of my probable relatives. I wondered where you’d gone!

In a moment, all the cheery mood disappeared from Khonsou’s face. She threw a mask of indifference over her abrupt sadness a moment later, but I still saw it. The young girl, both in appearances and literally, looked down at the ground. Her long pigtails drooped. “H-Hai, Taylor-senpai.” Her tone sounded incredibly defeated.

Gods damn it.

I felt like I'd just kicked a puppy.

“Hey, hey, I didn't mean anything by what I said, okay?” I tried to reassure her. I even floated closer to Khonsou and wrapped her up in a tentative hug. No matter how much I was averse to hugs after my two years of torment, this little girl needed one, and I had to repay her for my disbelief in her hurting her somehow.

Khonsou froze up when I embraced her. She looked up at me with a shocked, hopeful expression. This allowed me to see the tears that had started falling down her face.

Damn it. Now I felt even more guilty. What the hell does senpai even mean? More experienced close friend/family member? I think? As someone she apparently respected, I'd just stomped on her sense of self with my first couple of sentences. All because I was mad at one of my shards.

That wasn't this little girl's fault. None of any of this was her fault. She hadn't asked to be called into being.

Technically it was my fault.

And then I went and acted like- gods, a little like the Evil Emma towards her.

My actions, my words, made my heart scream at me.

That, more than anything else, really hammered home to me just what these… people were. They weren't Endbringers anymore. Whatever my Shard did, it turned them into people. Especially for Emma and Khonsou, who didn't exist before I took over control of them. Even Emma was better off than Khonsou.

At least she had memories of being a human girl.

“I'm sorry, Khonsou,” I apologized, heartfully and truthfully. I absentmindedly moved a hand up to her head to start running my fingers through her hair. “You can be Japanese if you want to be.”

Her breath hitched and she leaned into my embrace further with a sob of obvious relief. She snuggled into my chest like a young child who needed comfort from their mother. “A-arig-gato, T-Taylor-s-senp-pai!” she stuttered through her sobs.

Even with the sobbing, she seemed to be happy now. The cheery tone to her voice was back.

I never wanted to hear that lack of cheer from her ever again. I never wanted to see her cry again.

That’s when I realized what I’d been feeling all along, ever since I’d learned of her existence.

In a way? She was my daughter. And I had the feelings to match.

Oof. As if being a teen mom wasn't difficult enough, I also had to add Entity and Protection Engine bullshit into the equation.

Case in point, even as we embraced and I comforted Khonsou, her hands were still splayed out and controlling the bubble of stopped time around Ash Beast and Ben.

“How we gonna handle this, Khonny?” I gently asked her. I'd thought that nickname up on the spot, but it seemed good enough.

From the way her young face lit up brilliantly and her crying abruptly stopped, she loved it. “I can keep them like this until the local star goes supernova, T-Taylor-senpai. But I don't think you want that,” she sniffled.

I choked on air for a couple of seconds. “No,” I sputtered, ”no, Khonny. I'd rather handle Ash Beast and repair the Boardwalk before that time.”

She nodded rapidly, her pigtails flying. “You can walk through it!” she revealed to me. Then Khonsou gained a sly grin and blushed, embarrassed. That grin sent my heart soaring with joy, especially when I compared it to the tear tracks starting to dissipate from her cheeks. “Ben normally can too, but I'm pranking him,” she almost whispered, ducking her head to avoid looking at me.

I admit it. I giggled. Khonsou was just so damn cute! On purpose, yeah, but that made it no less effective, especially on me. “It's okay Khonny. I'm sure your… big brother, will get you back for this.” I stated that as nonchalant as I could while I disengaged my arms from around her and stood back up.

“Eep!” she squeaked, a look of fear dawning on her face as she processed just how many ways a dynakinetic had to counter prank her.

I snorted, shook my head, then focused.

I needed a way to get close to Ash Beast without dying. Or, well, letting my avatar body die.

I was still kinda attached to it.

I could just repeat my earlier trick I used to go superspeed. Beef my physics manipulation field up with my Alexandria Shard. Only this time, focus on defense instead of speed.

Why reinvent a perfectly functioning wheel?

I mentally moved the ‘slider’, for lack of a better term, of that Shard over to maximum defense.

“Okay, I'm ready,” I told Khonsou. That snapped her out of her Ben-flavored daymare. She’d most likely been imagining all the things he'd do to her.

...

Not in that way, jeez! He’s her brother!

Or her uncle. Or… something.

I hadn’t quite decided exactly what our relationship was, so I couldn’t nail down his title in relation to little Khonsou.

“H-Hai!” she nodded rapidly. “Go on in!”

And so I waded into the field of paused time.

The experience was… surreal.

As I stepped through the threshold of the gray bubble of paused time, the entire world lost its color. In fact the only color left was me. There was this kind of... dark gray haze around my body, bordering me just above where my physics manipulation field manifested.

Okay. I could survive in a Gray Boy time bubble created by an Endbringer.

I kind of figured I could, but getting confirmation on big things like this is always helpful.

Shaking my thoughts from my head, I started walking towards the still frozen forms of Ben and Ash Beast. As I approached I reached out with my Shard senses and looked at the Ash Beast.

Then I looked through it.

I found a Shard sitting on a destroyed world. the trademark Maelstrom of energy that followed the ash Beast around Africa had enveloped the entire planet. There was nothing left on the surface but smooth, sizzling lava.

And in the middle of it all, cool as a cucumber, was a mass of flesh and biocrystal almost as big as me.

Not Entity me, no one Shard can ever get that big, but Ash Beast’s was almost as big as Queen Administrator.

Whoo boy. This was going to be a fun one.

I reached out to the Shard and established connections. I was prepared for a fight, now that I knew I could actually pull one off after my encounter with and subsequent taking over of The Thief, and I could feel the code that allowed me to do this to Shards ready to essentially hack into it.

I was still pretty new at this, which is why it took me several seconds to realize I didn't need to do any of that.

Ash Beast’s Shard was one of Zion’s.

I let out a breath of relief and transmitted my command codes. it immediately acknowledged me as it's administrator.

Then it told me its name. Or, at least the translation of the name whatever let me understand Shardspeak performed of its name.

[Experimental Zero Point Extractor: Query Instructions] it sent me.

I had no idea what zero point was but it sounded very important.

[Query: Function] I sent it back.

[Data] was the immediate response.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Uh.

Welp.

I guess my energy needs were solved for the foreseeable future.

Zero Point Extraction. Otherwise known as pulling energy straight out of the quantum foam of the universe.

Every single part of me wanted that Shard and wanted it badly. I wanted it in me yesterday, and I didn't care how much that sounded like an innuendo because I want that Shard holy shit!!!

I barely had the presence of mind to command the Shard that it needed to disconnect from its host non-lethally. But command it to disconnect I did.

It obeyed my commands without question, severing its link with its hosts’ Corona Pollentia and Gemma. Khonsou must have sensed the disconnection because the gray bubble of paused time around me vanished.

The living explosion being chewed on by Ben drew into itself, then popped with a slight poof of smoke. Out of that cloud of smoke a dark-skinned boy fell.

Ben didn't need me to tell him. He retracted his teeth and caught the boy in his strong arms.

Right. Ash Beast was a little kid.

I wasn't even going to question it.

What I was going to do was integrate this new Shard with my core shards, and I was going to do it right then.

One command to The Shard to slip into my root reality. a pass over it with several of my matter cleansing shards to clean it up. I didn't want any lava getting on me. And then?

I connected to it. Physically.

It felt like I’d stuck my tongue in a power outlet.

“WOOOAAAAAH!” I shouted. I rose into the air, clenched my fists, and grinned.

I didn't even know how starved for energy I'd been before. But now I didn't just feel full, I felt awesome.

Even still, I managed to get over the high the raw amounts of energy rushing through my true body laid upon me. I shook my head side-to-side, breathed in and out, Andre adjusted my sensitivity to energy.

The high dimmed. I still felt great, but I wasn't on a power trip anymore.

“You are fine, correct?” Ben asked me, walking up to me as I landed back on the ground.

I nodded to him and smiled. “Yeah. Was just... getting used to the rush,” I explained.

He, surprisingly, nodded back knowingly. “It does indeed induce a most pleasurable feeling.”

I raise my eyebrows and blinked at him. Huh. I guess there was a reason he targeted nuclear power plants before, and it wasn't just for Conflict.

I felt I would be learning many surprising things about my tall, dark Protection Engine in the future.

[Emma,] I called out to my sister, [I just depowered Ash Beast. Would you come get him and take him back to the house to?]

[Sure!] she sent back.

Khonsou walked up to us, or rather skipped up, just as an orange Doormaker portal popped open next to her. “We did it, Taylor-senpai!” she cheered, raising her hand for a high five.

I sighed, rolled my eyes, and gave her it.

What? She was one step away from doing puppy eyes if I didn’t do it, and I wanted to be able to look at her without letting out actual stereotypical female coos as I did.

Ben just grinned at Khonsou. he didn't say a single word. Just. Grinned.

The pink haired little girl audibly gulped.

Emma stepped out of the portal and hugged me before I could interfere in their growing staring contest. “Taylor!” she exclaimed, “there was a note in Quarrel’s armpit for you!”

I slightly withdrew from my sister and stared her dead in the eyes, my mouth dropped.

She couldn't possibly have said what I just thought I heard.

“Yeah, I thought it was weird too, but it had your name on it,” she Shrugged, hand thing a folded piece of what looks like printer paper to me.

I took it from her, still staring at her warily, slowly bringing my arm back to my body.

Emma shrugged again, flit over to Khonsou faster than I could blink, and squeezed her into a tight hug. “OMG you’re so CUTE!” she squealed.

I was starting to think Path to Victory was full of crap when it said I would eventually be immune to bullshit.

I shook my head, breathes in and out again, looked at the folded piece of paper.

It had my name on it alright. In high quality ink.

Kinda wishing this was a dream, I proceeded to slowly unfold the mysterious note.

“From Auntie Path to Victory. She says Happy Birthday, Christmas, and all the other missed holidays. Please get her to stop annoying me. -Contessa,” I read off under my breath, my eyebrows climbing higher and higher as each word filtered across my consciousness.

...What?

No, seriously. What?!

You know what? Nope. I am not up to dealing with this right now, I thought resolutely. I folded the note up and shoved it in one of the pockets of my jeans. Out of sight, out of mind, until I could deal with the ramifications of the high levels of bullshit that note contained.

Emma and Khonsou cuddled for a while, then she took the boy who was previously the Ash Beast from Ben and portaled home.

Just in time for Murphy to laugh at me.

“Unknown Capes!” A strong, leader-type male voice boomed down the destroyed Boardwalk, “You are under arrest for destruction of private property and murder. Put your hands up where we can see them.”

I turned to look down the ruined street. Who the hell?

Oh.

---

The entire Brockton Bay Protectorate was arrayed at the end of the Boardwalk. Armsmaster was in the lead, flanked by Miss Militia and Dauntless. Battery, Assault, and Velocity were next to them.

The Wards weren’t present, though. Odd.

Anyways, they were here to… arrest... me. And my Protection Engines.

I looked around at the two people next to me. Two Endbringers.

Levi was over by Ziz in the destroyed ice cream shop.

Four Endbringers.

And I was an Entity.

I admit, I struggled very hard not to laugh.

Oh well, time to make a show of it. I had to make sure they took me and my… ‘hero’ team seriously. I also needed to hammer home just who three members of my team were, and that they were under new management.

And, apparently, get the message across that no, you do not try to arrest four Endbringers and a gods damned Entity!

Emma portaled in next to me, having sensed my irritation. “Huh. Look at that,” she commented.

I grinned at her, then Ben, and finally Khonsou. “Let’s have some fun with this.”

Ben nodded. Emma smiled.

Khonsou literally lept into the air, pumped her fists, and cried out with joy.

Fucking hell why did she have to make everything she did cute?!

Shaking my head to clear the impending cute overload, I lifted into the air. I proceeded to fly up above the Protectorate Capes and crossed my arms, staring down at them. I beckoned my Protection Engines to join me. How exactly they arrived I left up to them, though.

Turns out they have senses of humor.

Ben erupted out of the asphalt under me. He was glowing red hot from the Earth's mantle. He'd made a quick detour there from the street behind us literally just for his entrance. Dude had dedication for his art, that’s for sure.

The assembled capes tensed up. Miss Militia changed her gun out for something much bigger. It looked like it could launch missiles. Cruise missiles. I was chalking up her ability to even hold the thing to Shard bullshit.

Meanwhile, I was scanning all their Shards and taking data copies to grow actual Shards for later. Including Battery.

Huh, another Cauldron cape. Her Shard was a lot like Legend’s though, pretty much working fine, versus something like Eidolon’s. I shivered just remembering the feeling of what Cauldron had done to it.

Then Levi surfed into place beside Ben on a wave he summoned out of the nearby Bay, clutching his trident. His eyes glowed green. His body trailed mist behind it, a stylish application of his normal water echo.

Ziz was next. She flew up next to me in the air, her full hundreds of wings deployed and with three concentric circles of scorched building debris orbiting her. She smiled cheerfully at the Protectorate.

I guess it didn't really sink in as to just who they were facing until Troll Bird showed up. Now the capes were totally frozen in fear.

“Fuck me,” Assault swore. “All three?”

Emma flew up beside me on my other side. Her hair was flowing, just like mine, and clenched fists were hanging by her sides. She began to channel my Legend Shard and an aura of orange light formed around her body.

The capes’ eyes, every single one of them, went wide, and many faces drained of blood. To them? There was now a Fourth Endbringer. I don't think they'd even processed my presence or what it could mean yet.

“Double fuck,” Velocity added on to Assault’s earlier comment.

Ziz relayed an entertaining idea from her precog, which I agreed with wholeheartedly. We were already trolling the Protectorate. I was down to take it a step further, even adding my own segment.

“You gonna fight us?” I directly asked Armsmaster five seconds before he'd work up the nerve to ask me the same thing, grinning wide. “Because I don't think I can take the person whose logo is on my underwear seriously.”

Dead.

Fucking.

Silence.

Armsmaster’s jaw was totally dropped.

Assault looked like he was torn between cowering in terror and laughing his ass off. Even Miss Militia was having trouble keeping a straight face. Poor Dauntless looked like his brain had evacuated the premises. Velocity had his face in his hand.

Revealing I owned Armsmaster brand panties?

Some mild embarrassment with a side of mortification.

Making sure that the first words from the new controller of the Endbringers, words that would be relayed, repeated, and witnessed for what is likely the foreseeable future of humanity, words that would get movies made about them, trolled the eternally living shit out of the local Protectorate leader?

Priceless.

Ziz held a wing out to me and I fist bumped it.

[Worth. It!]

[Agreed] came a chorus of four voices.

Wait, where's Khonsou?

Then it all came crashing down when our sixth party member showed up.

The temporal ‘magical girl’ ran up behind Ben and Levi, panting. She was bent over with her hands on her knees. “Coulda… waited… for me!” she huffed out. “Ben-san!”

“You may consider yourself counter pranked, young sister,” Ben spoke calmly in that velvety voice of his.

And there went any semblance of the intimidation we'd just spent literal minutes setting up.

Ziz tossed a spare piece of masonry at the pink haired menace. It whacked her on the head.

“Oww!” she complained, rubbing the impact zone. She shot an angry glare at my winged Friendbringer. “What was that for?!”

Ziz tossed one at Ben too for good measure. He just grunted at the impact, making no other indications that he’d even noticed.

Assault lost the battle with his laughter, and despite the attempts at interference from his wife Battery, collapsed. He rolled around clutching his stomach as his cackling echoed through the ruined Boardwalk.

“Gods damn it, you two,” I lamented, banging my fist against my forehead.

 

Fourth
Chapter 6
Enter The Lude​

Armsmaster had a problem. A big one.

He usually had problems. Not enough time to Tinker. Issues with the Wards, or less commonly the Protectorate. Villains or vigilantes who are nearly as bad.

His counterpart in the PRT.

But the problem he was faced with now, he would give anything to trade. Even for all of his problems, forever, combined.

“The Endbringers disappeared without a trace several hours ago,” he continued to insist to the teenage girl who had no doubt already immortalized her opening words in the minds of his subordinates. Damn PR teams!

Assault was still laughing.

“Yeahp,” Taylor Hebert, the girl in question, agreed. She gestured to three of her five companions, the Simurgh look alike still hovering in the air alongside her. “And here they are now.”

“Forgive me if I do not take your word for it,” Armsmaster fired back. The fact most of the other Protectorate members did and he was essentially the only holdout went unsaid.

“You're forgiven,” she sing songed.

Armsmaster grit his teeth. She was already aggravating. It had barely been five minutes.

Dragon was connected to his armor, as usual. “They do share similar features, Armsmaster,” she said. “The Simurgh looking one even matches some… artistic renditions we can trace back to the Fallen.”

That was not what he wanted to hear. Even Dragon was getting dragged into the farce. “If they are Endbringers, we are sworn to fight them. If they aren't, you have still engaged in an act of terrorism on American soil,” he stated neutrally. He straightened up and clenched his fists around his Halberd. “You are under arrest.”

The girl stared at him in awed wonder for several moments.

Then she broke down giggling.

Armsmaster frowned. “Stop laughing. This is a serious matter!”

That just sent most of the opposing group into giggling or laughing fits.

“Stop!” he yelled, his tone becoming confused. It didn't make sense. Powerful, insane capes they might be, but they were facing the Brockton Bay Protectorate. They didn't have a chance.

“Oh my gods,” Hebert managed to get out. “A-Are you serious?”

“YES!”

“BWAHAHAHAHA!”

Armsmaster growled and started to take a step forward.

The platinum haired and winged girl abruptly stopped laughing. “He doesn't believe you, Taylor,” she spoke.

Hebert stopped laughing just as abruptly and righted herself in the air, staring at the winged girl. She was displaying signs of being surprised. “Wait, really?”

“Yup.”

Hebert scowled, crossed her arms and stared down at Armsmaster again. “These are the Endbringers, Armsmaster. I’m their…” she trailed off, momentarily staring down at the ground in thought, then grinned and looked back at him. “New Management!”

Armsmaster stared at her incredulously.

Who did this girl think she was kidding?

“Still doesn’t believe you,” the winged girl said.

Hebert threw down her arms and stomped her foot in midair. “Oh come on! What the hell do I have to do to make you see reality?!”

“There is nothing you can say which would convince me you are not mentally unsound,” Armsmaster deadpanned. “You believe your companions to be the Endbringers. The smallest of which is fifteen feet tall.”

“They changed size!”

“You’re insane!”

“No I’m not!”

“What could you possibly say to convince us of that?!” Battery called out.

“I have Legend as a character witness!”

Dead silence beyond Assault's continuous cackling. The argument between Armsmaster and Hebert had apparently been hilarious to the kinetic redirector.

“What?” Miss Militia finally asked.

“Alright,” Armsmaster admitted. “That's a new one.”

“Call him!”

Armsmaster glared at her for several more moments.

“Armsmaster?” Dragon spoke up from his suit, “...should I connect you?”

He stewed even longer, eventually sighing. “Fine,” he growled. “Use max alert level. Authcode is in my Halberd.”

“Connecting…”

The phone rang for several seconds. Legend picked it up and was instantly in serious mode. “Armsmaster. What's happened?”

“Legend,” Armsmaster greeted his superior cordially. “I am currently standing in the ruins of the Brockton Bay Boardwalk with a girl who claims to lead a team of capes with three members having similar powers to the Endbringers on the opposing side. She vehemently claims that they are, in fact, the Endbringers. Despite obvious evidence to the contrary.”

Legend swore. “Five? What the hell has she done now?”

Armsmaster was surprised. “Wait, you actually know her?” he asked incredulously.

His teammates were not tapped into the call like he was. The reactions to his outburst were varied, but all mixes of surprise.

Except Assault. He was into hysteria at this point.

“You have speakers in your suit, right?” Legend asked Armsmaster.

“Affirmative,” the Tinker confirmed.

“Put me on them.”

Armsmaster blinked, confused even more, but nonetheless did as he asked. “External speakers active.”

Legend got right to his point. “Taylor, I thought we were going to keep this under the radar,” he stressed pointedly.

The flying girl shrugged. “I said I'd keep your thing quiet. For now. Not my things. I'm not going to have my… family attacked on the street.”

Miss Militia grunted. Armsmaster knew that had hit a nerve in her. The rest of his team was watching with horrified silence.

Legend sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

Armsmaster wasn't just surprised any more. He was shocked. Legend was deferring to a teenager? What?

“I told Armsmaster you were our character witness,” she explained. “And I fully intend to inform the world about the New Management of these particular beings, so you should be prepared for some questions.”

That was a step too far. Teenagers did not dictate to the head of the Protectorate, Endbringers or no. “Now hold on a moment-” he started to intervene.

“Armsmaster, stand down,” Legend commanded. The Tinker was shocked yet again at the tone his superior took. “Things are going on at levels much, much higher than you. We need to treat this with a delicate touch.”

“Treat WHAT?!” he demanded, losing the little amount of control he had left. “A teenage girl with delusions of grandeur and five capes, three of which happen to have similar powers to defunct city destroyers?!”

“No,” Legend stressed, gritting his teeth, “the new Master of the Endbringers, who also happens to have the power to make more.”

Terse breaths were drawn in from all around. As one the Protectorate turned to look at Hebert, and lost whatever blood had been in their faces.

She wiggled her fingers at them, winking.

Velocity fell backwards. He’d fainted.

Armsmaster couldn't believe his ears.“WHAT.”

“...New Master, Legend?” Miss Militia timidly asked.

Armsmaster clenched his fists. His SiC was never timid. She must be terrified.

Just like him. He just refused to show it.

Legend sighed again and groaned. “Yes, and that is a can of worms for a very different day. Suffice it to say the Endbringers were Mastered into attacking and killing. Taylor Hebert here triggered and co opted control of the Endbringers from the old Master. She also can create more on command, something the previous controller could not,” he explained succinctly.

More silence. Even Assault shut up.

Hebert was grinning the whole time.

“...Shit,” the previously cackling jokester of the Brockton Bay Protectorate summed up.

The three Endbringer candidates, which Armsmaster still did not believe but was assigning names to (mentally anyways) just in case this insanity proved true, looked guilty and sorrowful. His cameras even made out slight tears emerging from the tear ducts of The Simurgh.

He had a feeling his day was about to get a lot more complicated.

“...SHIT!” Dauntless exclaimed.

Everyone looked to him with shock. The man never swore, no matter what happened to him.

He saw the looks and sighed. “I think this situation is enough to break my promise to myself,” he lamented.

“Hear hear,” Assault chimed in.

“Oh, and Battery?” Legend called out to the second woman on the team.

“Yes sir?” she asked, warily.

“We're calling in that favor. Help Taylor out, please, with whatever she might need on the Protectorate side.”

Battery’s eyes widened behind her mask. Her mouth didn't change and there were no other body language cues to demonstrate she had reacted to Legend's words in any way but normally.

Those precautions were not enough to fool Armsmaster’s social programs.

Battery nodded. “Yes sir,” she acknowledged.

Armsmaster would have to talk to her about that later. And whatever this apparent ‘favor’ entailed.

“Now, about how to manage this particular reveal,” Legend continued. He proceeded to go over the details as the Triumvirate and the top levels of the Protectorate knew them, with Hebert chiming in with some information from time to time.

Even thirty seconds in, Armsmaster knew; this was going to be a very long day.

---

Legend walked out of a Doormaker portal into the new Cauldron base. “You will never believe who I just got off the phone with and what we talked about!” he cheerily greeted the other members of the secret organization.

Doctor Mother glared up at Legend's bright face from her chair. She was holding an ice pack to the side of her head. She wasn't a Parahuman, but she did feel like she had a Thinker headache from what had been going on lately. “You're enjoying this far too much,” she deadpanned.

“Agreed,” Eidolon and Alexandria chimed in.

“Enjoying what? I've always wanted to be the leader of a secret, worldwide conspiracy organization whose members go behind the backs of the people they trust with their lives, their family, and lie to their faces!” Legend fired back, just as cheerily. He managed to somehow even make that sound real.

“When are you going to let that go, Paul?” Rebecca exclaimed, thumping her hands down on the table. “Yes, we lied to you. I'm sorry. Are you happy now?”

In a flash of light, Legend was standing over Alexandria and his eyes were glowing a killing shade of green. Rebecca flinched backwards at the look of malice on her friend's face.

“I am going to be holding this over you for a long time,” he growled.

Alexandria looked like she wanted to say something, but just sighed instead. “How many times do I have to apologize, Paul?” she asked genuinely. Rebecca, not Alexandria, stared up into his eyes, pleading for him to understand.

And he did. He really, truly did. What they were facing had been insurmountable before the reveal of Taylor and her father.

But they'd made one crucial mistake in their procedure. Paul had always been the conscience of the Triumvirate. He was supposed to be that for Cauldron, too.

But they excluded him from the real decision making, and in the process, lost their way.

The promise the four of them had made back when they were four, broken by the two who most needed to follow it.

“A lot, Rebecca,” he said, his tone softening. “I'm not as good a man as Clark was.”

That did it. He saw the stab of real pain his words caused in his old friend. She pressed her lips in a firm line and nodded, closing her eyes.

Good. She needed the humility.

Paul stood back up and glanced at his other alive friend. “How are you doing, David?” he asked.

“I created the Endbringers, Paul,” he morosely stated. It didn't need to be said that the rest of his sentence was ‘Not well.’

“It's not entirely your fault. Your… Shard is the one that actually made them,” Legend tried to be his usual optimistic self.

David just crossed his arms and looked away. “Partial responsibility for the deaths of countries and hundreds of millions of people is still hundreds of millions of people.” His tone was flat, like he was dead on the inside.

Paul grimaced. David might as well have been for how much happiness he displayed since Taylor dropped that bomb. He couldn't begrudge her for that, it needed to be said and revealed… but he did wish she'd done it an easier way.

“Well, Armsmaster was the one who called me,” Legend continued with his original spiel. He walked around the oak table, the same one from their old base, and sat at the head opposite Doctor Mother. “He was asking if I was really a character witness for the Endbringers and their new controller.”

Rebecca groaned out loud and allowed her face to fall forwards, smacking straight into the table. “God damn it.”

Number Man raised an eyebrow. “What has the younger Entity done?”

“I talked to her too,” Paul continued to explain. “She, her father, and the Endbringers, the new one based on her friend included, went to get ice cream at the Brockton Bay Boardwalk. Somehow Ash Beast and The Butcher showed up. Ash Beast flattened the boardwalk and Taylor and the Endbringers took them down.” He waved a hand towards the woman who used to be the best weapon Cauldron ever had, sitting at her own table in a soundproof yet windowed room off the meeting room's hallway and staring off into space. Paul scowled at the possibility his investigations had brought up. “I think we know who to thank for this particular chain of unlikely events.”

Contessa had apparently ordered Doormaker to drop both of them right on top of Taylor. Why, Paul didn't yet know, but he was going to find out.

Rebecca let out a much louder groan of misery and thumped her head into the table. She was clearly watching her strength given the surface didn't scuff. She must have finally been tired of replacing the secret organization's tables out of her own pocket.

David had the look of morbid curiosity Paul was so familiar with on his face, hidden as it was beneath his hood. “And what, exactly, did you say?”

Paul sighed, collapsing back into his chair. He brought both his hands up to his face and rubbed them up and down as if he could get rid of the bullshit his life had become by just that action. “I said yes. Highly classified, make sure the information doesn't get out, and that the Endbringers were Mastered.”

David winced at the reminder, but nodded. “The best you could do, really,” he muttered.

Everyone was silent for several long seconds.

Paul drew in a terse breath… and sighed. “Yeah,” he agreed, morbidly. “Yeah, I know.”

“As much as I believe in the Protectorate and the PRT, I'm not that confident in our informational security with something like this,” Rebecca spoke up, her voice a little muffled from the fact she was almost kissing the oak table surface.

Legend drew in a deep breath and sighed once more. “I talked to her, too,” he revealed.

Everyone present sat up and stared at him. “You what?!” Alexandria shouted.

“She told me to spread it everywhere. And that they would be doing that with or without our help,” he continued, reaching up to rub the bridge of his forehead.

“WHAT?!” Rebecca shouted again.

“No!” Doctor Mother protested.

“Are you serious?!” the Number Man asked.

“Hah, she has guts.” That was David.

“Paul, we need to keep this secret!” Rebecca pressed, thumping her hands on the table again.

Legend looked at her askance and raised his eyebrows. "Do you really want me to call our resident eldritch teenage horror back?" he asked warningly. “She’s doing it. She told me. Hell, she informed me, like there wasn’t even a discussion to be had. We can help her or be in her way. She did not speak favorably of what would happen to us if we decided to try that.”

The entire room was silent once more.

“Shit,” Rebecca cursed, her head thumping into the table again.

“I believe that is what both Assault and Dauntless, of all people, of the Brockton Bay Protectorate said in summary, yes.”

David just leaned back and brought his hands to his face.

“I told you this would happen if you allowed her this freedom,” Number Man stated neutrally.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Paul lamented. He turned his head away from them all and glared at the wall. “Your collective actions saw to that.”

More silence, this time the guilty kind. It sat on the room like a physical thing, the weight of what they’d done.

“Poor Contessa,” Doctor Mother finally, absentmindedly commented, staring at the single person in the world who had sacrificed even more than she to destroying the Entities through the transparent material separating their rooms. She pointedly ignored Legend’s suggestion in the best way she knew; changing the subject.

---

"Path to defeating Scion."

[0 steps remaining. Path complete.]

Contessa rubbed the bridge of her nose with her fingers in an attempt to massage away her frustration.

"Path to defeating Scion."

[0 steps remaining. Path complete.]

"Grah! PATH TO DEFEATING SCION!!!" she finally shouted.

[...Calculating.]

Contessa collapsed onto the table. It was the first progress she'd had getting anything out of her passenger in hours. Even if it was just a calculation, it seemed like Path to Victory was finally doing something besides endlessly informing her the Path was already finished.

[New Path found. 2 steps remaining.]

Her head shot up and her eyes widened. "EXECUTE PATH!" she almost shouted.

[Step 1: Attack table with face.]

Contessa followed through in a heartbeat, not even paying attention to the step's instructions as she felt her passenger guide her action. She'd done so billions of times before. If there was truly a two step process to defeating Scion even after all this time of 'completed paths', with the teenaged elder horror and her father taking residence upon Earth Bet, and with Cauldron kicked out of their base by said horror...

She would follow through to the end. No matter how much her face now hurt. Nor how much her apparently now sapient passenger insisted that the two were family for them both.

[Step 2: Say "Path complete." Alternative: Scream with delicious irritation.]

Nevermind.

The fact that for once Path to Victory was providing a set of possible steps instead of just one perfect one was lost on the woman named Fortuna as her wordless scream echoed through the halls of the Cauldron backup base. Several lower level members of the secret organization would begin swearing a Banshee had infested their base while they were holed up in the original one.

[0 steps remaining. Path complete.]

---

“Bro.”

“Bro.”

The dynamic gaming-themed ‘villain’ duo Uber and L33t were sitting in their base of operations deep in the warehouses of Brockton Bay. They’d been remote operating Leet’s Camera Drone to scout out the Boardwalk’s new and improved distribution of Enforcers. The express purposes of this was of course so that they could orchestrate yet another video game themed heist of the Bay’s tourist trap.

And then everything went to hell.

The Ash Beast showed up. The Boardwalk was destroyed in an instant, and it looked like all the excrement was impacting the rotary air redirecting device at FTL speeds.

Contrary to the normal eventuality that common sense dictated, however, a team of teenagers walked out of a ruined ice cream shop- or in the case of a couple, flew- and proceeded to totally and completely stomp the S-Class threat INTO THE GROUND.

Like they hadn't even bothered trying.

That wasn’t even the freakiest part, though. The holder of that honor was the girl of the two who had remained behind in the ice cream shop, holding onto a young African American man.

“What the hell, man?” Uber asked Leet. “Are you seeing what I'm seeing?”

“You mean a walking, talking, internet fanart drawing?” Leet asked Uber back.

“Yeahp.”

The two of them looked at each other for a few seconds, then back to the spitting image of some Simurgh fanart they’d both seen on the Internet before.

“It can't be her, right?” Lee asked. “Like, we're crazy-”

And then the winged girl turned her head to look straight at the Camera Drone. Her misty gray eyes were clearly visible what with the subtle glow they started to emit.

Both men gulped.

“Leet,” Uber asked.

“Yeah Uber?” Leet replied in a small voice.

Uber swallowed hard. “Is the Simurgh looking straight at us right now?”

“Can’t be, this is a recording… and she’s just a teenage girl-” Leet started to refute.

Then that same ‘teenage girl’ nodded.

The gaming themed duo stood, frozen in place, for a good dozen seconds. The sound of battles and explosions rang out somewhere off-screen, but the Drone hadn't moved. The girl idly looked around her ruined surroundings, some kind of ice cream shop from what little remained, while they were busy gaping.

Leet opened his mouth to say something again and her head shot around to stare straight at the Drone again.

Leet... closed his mouth.

“Okay, so she has the creepy factor down,” Uber lamented.

The girl quickly nodded again, grinning a self-satisfied smile.

“Stop that!” Leet demanded, slamming his hands down on his desk. He left out of his chair and stared straight at the video, his nose almost touching the monitor. “This is a recording, you can't just respond to us live! That's bullshit!”

The girl closed her eyes, shrugged, and tilted her head to the side. Her self-satisfied smile turned into a smug grin.

“Stop it!”

Uber walked forward and placed a calming hand on his brother in games’ shoulder. “Cool it Leet. If she is who we think she is…”

The girl on the video helped him make his point by smiling angelically, closing her eyes, and raising her eyebrows. She seemed to be the picture of innocence.

Leet sighed and closed his eyes. He collapsed back into the chair. “I can’t handle this, bro,” he stated flatly.

The girl’s innocent smile only widened.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Uber cut in with a commanding tone. “Who the hell are you and why do you look so much like an Endbringer?”

The girl shrugged, still smiling, and nodded.

“Why are you nodding?”

She nodded again.

“Stop that.”

The girl shook her head. Still smiling.

“Okay then, nods or shakes only,” Uber realized. He went over a list of questions in his head and decided the important one was the first one he would ask. Steeling himself, he stared into her eyes through the recorded video and spoke. “Are you the Simurgh?”

She nodded. No hesitation.

Leet’s face went white as the blood drained from it. Uber, on the other hand, was not so easily convinced.

“Prove it,” he demanded, crossing his arms as if daring her to.

And right in front of them, on their desk, Leet’s keyboard and mouse began to float into the air. They began disassembling at an incredibly fast pace until the only things left were components. And keys.

Ziz, they spelled out, with the second Z being represented by a sideways N.

As if on cue, Uber lost all the blood in his face too. His crossed arms dropped.

They were convinced. Only that particular Endbringer could both communicate to them from a recording and manipulate things in the room where it was being viewed in synch with her appearance on the video.

Both men began trembling.

“H-How can we help you, o-oh Supreme Overlady of Feathers?” Uber managed to squeak out.

The fucking Simurgh shrugged. Now that the two of them knew who she was, that seemed almost surreal. She was displaying emotions, looked human, and most importantly, wasn’t 15 feet tall.

“Y-you d-don’t know?!” Leet exclaimed, eyes widening. “How? How can you not know something?!”

The keyboard keys on the desk began to reorganize again. Slowly they spelled out words, one after the other. Not. Endbringer. Anymore. Where there needed to be two of a letter, the missing one was either replaced by a similar looking key (3 for a second e, for instance) or if one was not available, the key needed jumped along the word while they scanned across it with their eyes.

Her telekinesis was frankly complete bullshit.

The winged girl raised her eyebrow and smirked at him.

Uber sighed inside his head and rolled his eyes. Okay, yes, her precog was also bullshit. “You’re not an Endbringer anymore?” he asked,only slightly dumbfounded. “What the hell are you now then?”

The Simurgh… or Ziz, if that was her name, pointed away from her, to the left. The Drone suddenly started recording position keeping errors as it was forced to turn sideways and look outside of the ruined ice cream shop.

Just in time for a girl in jeans and a tight T-shirt to come out of some kind of extremely fast flight, given the loud BOOM and shockwave that accompanied her arrival. She was now hovering next to a much younger girl with pink, actually pink, hair in pigtails. On the other side of them out of the focus of the Drone some kind of gray bubble performed the role of a backdrop.

The position keeping errors faded away as Ziz rotated the Drone back to face her and into perfect alignment with its original location. Protector. Of Her, the keys said.

“You protect a teenage girl now?” Leet asked incredulously.

“Why?!” Uber asked.

Freed me. Was Mastered. Now I follow her.

And wasn’t that a terrifying thought. Apparently a parahuman existed powerful enough to Master the Endbringers.

This was so high above their pay grade. The looks the duo traded said more than their words ever could.

Uber looked back to the visibly patiently waiting Endbringer-turned-girl and gulped once more. “What about the others?” he hesitantly asked.

Levi, Ben, also freed. They follow her as well.

Uber had to sit down. Right now there was a girl, clearly a cape herself given her flight abilities, with control of not one, not two, but three Endbringers.

He looked back down at the keys. They jiggled a little at his gaze, as if to rub it in.

They clearly had their powers still. And given the distance between Uber, Leet, and Ziz, had been completely and totally sandbagging before.

The video with Ziz on it started emitting an unending stream of error beeps. Uber and Leet looked up at the video to see the the Drone reporting errors about it receiving a huge influx of new data. Errors about storage space filling up faster than it should have flowed over the screen… until with a wave of her hand, Ziz made them just go away.

At the same moment the mouse parts on the desk jolted into the air and reassembled in a single second. The mouse plopped back down on the desk, then moved into and bumped Leet’s hand.

The duo jumped at the sudden movement.

Their throats were too dry to gulp now, so Leet just scrambled to look at the filesystem of the Drone. A few clicks and he had the folder brought up once more.

There was much more footage on it than there had been earlier.

Leet, trembling, took his hand off the mouse and slowly backed away from his computer. “That’s not how filesystems work,” he mumbled under his breath, staring wide eyed at the floor.

Uber took over from his buddy and opened one of the new files on a second monitor. He didn’t dare close the video with Ziz on it. They were all action shots of the girl Ziz said she was protecting and another girl. This file seemed to be them taking down... holy shit, was that The Butcher?!

Uber emulated what Leet had done mere moments earlier and slowly took his hand off the mouse. Ziz frowned, sighed, and the mouse proceeded to move on its own.

Both gaming villains pushed their chairs back even further.

The mouse moved to one of the last files and opened it up in the window that had been playing the Butcher’s utter defeat. The first thing the duo noticed was that the girl was hovering in the air, arms crossed, and that Ziz and the other girl they’d seen help the protected girl take down The Butcher were flanking her. On the ground were two teen boys that they immediately pegged as the humanized forms of Behemoth and Leviathan, what with the lava and the water.

Then the girl spoke.

“You gonna fight us? Because I don’t think I can take the person whose logo is on my underwear seriously.”

Despite their fear, their incredulity, neither Uber nor Leet could resist breaking out in hysterical laughter at the dumbfounded look on Armsmaster’s face. It was perfectly visible through his visor and his body language just confirmed the expression.

It only got better when the pink haired girl they saw earlier ruined the entire dramatic awe aura the Endbringers and the one they were protecting had managed to create by being adorable.

The keys clacked once again and the two abruptly sat ramrod straight, completely sober once more.

Make your magic. Show the world we are not to be feared anymore. Send it everywhere.

The moment the gaming villain duo had finished reading that sentence the components for the keyboard rapidly reassembled and it clunked down on the desk.

The Ziz on the first video raised her fingers, and a wing, to her forehead and snapped off a salute. With both. She smirked, winked, and reached out another wing to the Drone. “Boop!” she spoke, for the first time.

Uber and Leet preemptively cringed back, expecting painful screeching in their heads, but all they heard was a rather melodic and angelic sounding teenage girl’s voice.

Then the video ended.

Uber looked at Leet.

Leet looked at Uber.

“Bro.”

“Bro.”

They looked at each other for several more seconds, contemplating whether they should refuse an Endbringer’s request.

The keyboard lightly rattling put paid to that idea. Half an hour later, the newest Uber and Leet Show video went up, containing the footage the winged Endbringer had given them and some explanations to go with it.

---

I’m fucked.

Sophia could only think that over and over as she rushed around the Wards section of the PRT HQ.

I’m so so so so SO fucked.

Even as she yanked her old pre-Wards costume, her real costume, out of her PRT locker, she was cursing out the bitch in her head.

Fucking HEBERT triggers and the weakling gets to control the FUCKING ENDBRINGERS! WHAT THE FUCK-

Sophia hadn’t even really wanted to do anything to the stick-thin, weak, lanky, too-tall girl. It was Emma’s idea. Sophia was just trying to be a good friend, make her friend stronger. Like she’d become. And Emma wanted to make Taylor strong, too.

They were like sisters once, she’d said. Emma wanted that to continue. As a personal favor to her new fellow survivor, Sophia had obliged. She had taken her considerable knowledge of interrogation and torture techniques that she learned on the street as a vigilante and applied them liberally.

The dark-skinned survivor might’ve thought twice about it if Taylor had shown any kind of reaction. Good, bad, weak, survivor, didn’t matter, something.

But the freak just. wouldn’t. break.

Sure, she cried in the beginning and melted down a few times. But then she seemed to become disconnected and nothing worked anymore.

At that point Sophia had been forced into the Wards, and an easy outlet for her frustrations was right there.

A source that no matter what Sophia, Emma, Madison, or the others did, seemed impervious to harm.

The ultimate sheep. So lost in ignorance and blind to the real world they were incapable of being affected by cold, harsh truth.

That was when Sophia started to enjoy it. Shoving the sheep into her locker might've been Emma's idea, but Sophia pitched in with the addition of the trash, bugs, shit, and pads.

Sophia had been the one to push her in, too. Emma lost her nerve at the last second. Madison never had it.

Sophia was a better survivor than Emma so she hadn't blamed her. The redhead just needed more time. She could become strong. Sophia could feel it.

Then again she hadn't felt Hebert could be anything but weak forever and look how that turned out.

I'M FUCKED!

Taylor Hebert had faced down the entire Brockton Bay Protectorate. After destroying the Boardwalk and killing off The fucking Butcher and The goddamned Ash Beast, she then stood across from them as if they were nothing.

Given who was with her, they might as well not be.

Sophia wasn't book smart but she had damned good instincts. She knew exactly who they were the second she saw them. Taylor controlled the Endbringers, had somehow made them into what looked like humans, and she had an Emma, too.

Sophia knew, even as she fished her original crossbows out of their hiding place under her Wards bed, the orange glowing girl next to the sheep hadn't been Emma.

She had a kind, if stern, expression.

Emma wasn't kind.

She had to shed that to become a survivor. Just like Sophia had to shed any kind of empathy.

They were the chains of sheep.

No, Taylor had another Endbringer that for some reason she'd made in the shape of her old friend. She didn’t just control them, she could also make new ones.

Sophia couldn’t fight that. Survivors became survivors because they learned when to fight and when to retreat for regrouping. Four Endbringers and the girl who made them was no match for Shadow Stalker, no matter how much that pained Sophia to admit.

So she had to run. When she returned, and she would return, she would make Taylor pay for forcing her to run from something. Pay for making her do the one thing she swore she never, ever would. She sent a quick text to Emma warning her to do the same, then pulled on her mask.

Just in time.

The mask-up alarm rang out in the empty Wards area. Sophia was the only one there. She'd refused to go to the strategy meeting the rest of them went to.

One second later she had her mask on, and she was complete again.

She couldn't just go out the window. That paranoid, fat bitch Piggot had electrified the entirety of the walls, window included, when Sophia was brought in on ‘probation’.

She would have to fight the Wards and get out the normal way. The only one she might have an ounce of regret for the injuries they were about to suffer at her hand was Vista. The little girl tried so hard to be a survivor even with everyone treating her like the innocent she no longer was. It gave Sophia what might be labelled respect by other people for the space warper.

Sophia turned to smoke and raised her crossbows, lethal bolts loaded, towards the door. She began mentally counting down the seconds.

When she reached one, she let loose with both bows. The bolts started to shimmer back into reality just as the door was sliding open. Both bolts hit true on the chest of the first person through.

Sophia paled under her mask, inside her shadow.

She wasn't just fucked anymore. She was dead.

The living shadow stood, frozen in horror, and while she would never admit it out loud, a fuckload of fear.

“What the hell?” Taylor FUCKING HEBERT said as she brushed two of Sophia’s most lethal weapons off of her completely unbroken T-Shirt.

“What is it, Taylor?” Aegis’ voice asked. He floated into the air and came over the heads of the rest of them.

Sophia paled even further when she registered just who was behind Taylor. Lined up like ducklings behind their mother were the Endbringers and the fake Emma.

None of them were looking at her with favorable expressions.

“Someone shot me with crossbow bol-” Taylor started to say, when her eyes landed on the gaseous shadow in the center of the room.

A head-splitting screech ripped through Sophia's head. Pain, pain, [PAIN] was all she knew. A part of her was writhing in agonizing [PAIN].

Sophia clutched her head and let her body go limp. She screamed out at the top of her lungs. Instead of collapsing to the floor, however, she stood stock still, forced to remain upright, and whimpered under the assault of something so much [MORE].

In the few moments Sophia could keep her eyes open, she found out that Taylor was glaring death at her. She was the one causing the [PAIN].

The no longer stick thin girl was attacking her without even moving. She was curvy in a way Emma would envy.

Through the [PAIN], Sophia was able to access a glimpse of her usual instincts. They were screaming at her that this girl, Taylor, wasn't a girl anymore.

Said false girl clenched her fist around the crossbow bolts, seemingly uncaring about the way they squealed in protest at the torture her strength put them under as she compressed them into balls, and stared molten death at the writing shadow. “SOPHIA.”

The terrified girl would have defecated if she wasn't a shadow at that moment. Somewhere [ELSEWHERE], a part of her did.

---

Retreat. Hebert will kill us. Get out of the Bay.

Emma Barnes stared at the last message she’d received from Sophia just before her fellow survivor, guide, and mentor had gone offline.

What the hell did she mean? Taylor, kill them? She would have to be strong for that.

Her sister wasn’t strong. She was just the ultimate sheep. Emma had failed her.

Every day at school, she failed her.

She tried and tried and tried, so hard, burning every bridge she had ever built with the taller girl. Desecrated their memories, destroyed their mother’s flute, and even stuffed her inside her locker.

And yet still, still, even with the additions Sophia made to the experience, Taylor was still weak.

She had such a bright light when Emma looked at her. She had ever since came up the road to meet her again after Sophia saved her and her father. The moment she’d had an entire daydream in a single second where Taylor’s mom… their mom, pleaded with her to make Taylor strong. She asked Emma to do it as Taylor’s sister in all but blood. No matter the cost.

Emma knew she needed it.

And so, she began.

Not that it ever did anything.

For a while the glow inside Taylor grew and grew. It looked like she would finally reach the tipping point. That all of Emma’s tearing down of her sister would pay off, and she would emerge stronger than before. Like she had. Like Sophia had.

Taylor’s mom’s flute was supposed to do it. But instead… Taylor just grew a shell and hid inside, like a turtle.

The glow almost disappeared.

Emma panicked. She could admit that. She started escalating further and further as the light grew dimmer and dimmer. Finally she couldn’t bear to see her sister fall, and so she planned the Locker.

It… sort of worked.

Emma had visited her in the hospital. Her glow came back, brighter than ever, and it seemed that she had succeeded!

...But then nothing further happened. No abilities, no strength. And one day her dad took her home.

That was yesterday.

Emma had gone in to try and see if her light had grown and found her gone. She was ready to give up. Ready to apologize to Taylor’s mom, tell her she couldn’t do it. That Taylor just wouldn’t be able to do it.

Seemed like Sophia had cracked sooner than she had, judging by the message.

Emma collapsed back onto her bed with a sigh. She’d give it another day. One more extended period of torment to try and make Taylor strong. Then she’d give u-

“EMMA!” her mother shrieked from the living room. She sounded terrified. “GET DOWN HERE!!!”

Emma’s eyes shot wide open. She flipped out of her bed, landing on her feet, and sprinted out her door and down the stairs. If someone had found out that she was strong and was threatening her mom, she swore-

But no such thing was happening. Zoe Barnes was standing in front of their widescreen TV in the living room, backing away. Her hands were over her mouth and she looked like she had seen a ghost.

“Mom, what’s wrong?!” Emma cried out as she reached her side. She discreetly summoned a portion of her own light in her hand, ready to erase whatever had scared her mom from existence.

Zoe’s eyes flicked over to her and she shrieked again, this time illegibly. She tripped over her own feet and fell onto the couch. She srabbled back from her daughter. “Emma why are you on TV?!”

Emma looked at her mom like she was crazy. “What?”

Zoe saw her confusion, gulped, and pointed her finger shakingly at the TV. “L-look!”

Emma blinked, turned, and stared at the news report on the screen.

The moment her eyes landed on her, what blood she had in her pale skin drained out of her face.”What?” she whispered.

Taylor was on the screen. Taylor. She was flying in the air by herself, flanked by a pale, platinum blonde haired, hundred winged girl. On her other side, fists clenched and glowing a lethally bright orange… was Emma.

Emma stared at herself for a few seconds. Then she stared at Taylor. Even from the news report, she could see the flare of light around Taylor that nobody else ever saw. It was bright, large, and beautiful.

The redheaded girl broke out in choked sobs. She dismissed the bit of light she had pulled out of herself and approached the TV, lightly touching the surface with her fingers.

She’d done it.

Taylor was strong.

Emma Barnes pressed her head against the screen and closed her eyes. She sighed with relief. “Taylor,” she breathed, “I’m so proud of you.”

A moment later she drew her head back, opened her eyes, and stared straight at her sister. “I’m coming to you.”

 

Fourth
Chapter 7
The Only Things We Have To Fear​

They never show the superhero battle cleanup on TV.

I used to wonder why. Given some of the damage I've seen done, you'd think that the powers needed to fix it would be a good show all on their own.

Now I know better.

I have something like a hundred separate sources of powers available to me, to say nothing of how many possible powers I can theoretically wring out of them, and it's boring as shit.

Due to the resolution needed to accurately return everything to the way it was before Contessa's little stunt with the Ash Beast, I had to reconstruct each building.

One at a time.

As fascinating as watching reality boil and matter bubble into existence is… it gets mind numbing after more than a hundred instances of doing the same thing over and over.

I didn't even know the Boardwalk had this many buildings!

And Armsmaster really wasn't making this any easier. He walked along, or should I say clunked along, besides me while I bent the fabric of space and time over my knee. His ‘help’ came in the form of double checking my work to make sure it was up to code. In his opinion that helped me, because otherwise the PRT would make me do it again correctly.

Armsmaster is one dense Tinker.

So is his Shard, by the way. Much like Sarah and Inference Engine, Colin Wallis and Efficiency are two peas in a pod.

As evidence to this statement, I present the fact they both believed that the PRT could make me do anything, ever, at all.

I rolled my eyes at another meaningless building code in the endless stream he was bombarding me with. It was like he thought that not only was I irresponsible, but by pure point of fact of him being far too responsible in my presence that it would rub off on me. Or something.

...That made way too much sense to just be an idle notion.

I poked Path to Victory.

Yep. Unapologetic grin again.

You know it’s getting bad when the pieces of you can think for themselves. Especially when those pieces are capable of manipulating reality around you-

Oh.

Heh.

I was still going about this as a human would.

And while I did need and require of myself that I would remain human in morality and thinking, that didn’t mean I couldn’t use my already vast array of superpowers to my advantage.

And so I poked Path to Victory again. Dad said that it was the Shard that helped him learn to be an Entity. That it was an I Win button, essentially.

So… [Path to Victory: How do I repair the Boardwalk quickly and correctly?]

[DATA]

…..

That is such bullshit.

Path to Victory had just handed me the detailed specs for every single building, hell, every single biological organism inside the buildings from the very millisecond before Ash Beast arrived.

It was entirely amused at my surprise, too. As if this wasn't remotely close to the maximum of its capabilities.

A pleased grin alongside a piece of information hit me.

[DATA!]

…..I internally increased my estimation of the bullshit levels Path to Victory was capable of.

Sixteen steps to rule the world? Was it serious?

[DATA]

Steps to finding out if it was serious: one, say Yes.

Right.

Well.

I Win Shard indeed.

Fucking hell. No wonder it helped my dad get a handle on his new existence.

And Contessa had a barely limited version of this? How didn't Cauldron already rule the world?!

[DATA]

…..They did, in fact. Shadow rule. Oh great. Fantastic.

Well at least I didn't need to worry about them, as the number of steps to get rid of said shadow rule and replace it with my own wasn't even in the double digits.

As for actually doing it? Well, I didn't know what a snake and a fox had to do with it, but I wasn't really interested in glassing things from orbit anyways.

...Maybe later, if Cauldron doesn't shape up?

Anyways, if my Matter Manipulator and Shaper Shards worked together, and I fed the data Path to Victory gave me into them, they could return the Boardwalk to its undestroyed glory with a mere snap of my fingers. People (with their memories!), animals, and even bacteria included.

If I chose to make any motion accompany the action at all.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I mean, intellectually I knew just how powerful I’d become. My new biological species was ludicrous. We were capable of reaching within a percentage of the speed of light for crying out loud, and that was without any form of FTL. Or reaching across realities as easily as normal humans snapped their fingers, and manipulating the structure of subatomic particles while doing so. Given enough time it was likely we could actually build stars.

Nevermind that the examples of my new race never had done any of these things, they were still possible.

It might seem unreal for me to continue being shocked by my new existence, but it was just starting to sink in. It’d only been, what, less than a day since I’d woken up.

I was allowed some mental leeway.

“-ire Code SAF-6015.2 requires that you replace the automatic fire warning devices in any multi-unit dwellings, including, but not limited to, nursing homes, rooming houses, dormitories, residential board and care facilities, hotels, motels, apartment buildings, buildings containing condominium units or rental units. You also have to ensure that the devices are powered by the building's electrical serv-”

Oh my gods. Armsmaster was still droning on and on. I couldn't take it anymore!

“ENOUGH!” I yelled, stomping my foot.

I will forever deny how much enjoyment I got out of the at least full foot Armsmaster managed to jump.

“Armsmaster, if I put the entire Boardwalk back together correctly, will you please shut up?” I asked, planting my hands on my hips.

He stopped walking, turned around, and came to a stop right in front of me.

Shit, he's tall.

I was a tall girl, but I wasn't as tall as Armsmaster, much less in power armor.

And I totally didn't subconsciously hover into the air a little to make up for the height difference.

Nope.

But the non action I didn't do brought me nose to visor with him.

We stared at each other for an entire, long minute. My hands were starting to get fidgety when he finally spoke.

“Five minutes, sixteen point seven seconds,” he informed me.

...What?

“What?” I asked out loud, cocking my head to the side.

What was visible of his face morphed into a wry smirk. “That is how long you managed to go while listening to me recite the New Hampshire Fire Building Codes. Congratulations. You beat Miss Militia by about a minute.”

I stared at him more. Did he just…

My shocked expression didn't seem to faze him. “You can consider this payback for the underwear comment if you prefer.”

He fucking did.

Armsmaster wasn't supposed to know what a sense of humor was, much less possess one.

Yet, then and there on the still mostly destroyed Boardwalk, he broke my expectations and revealed his.

Very well. If he wanted to play, I'd happily oblige him.

I narrowed my eyes at him and moved close enough that my breath started misting on his visor. “You know,” I solemnly intoned, automatically reaching up to adjust my glass-

Oh, right. I didn't have glasses anymore. Didn't need them.

Regardless, I continued with the gesture as if I didn't care. Had to get started on displaying my knowledge of the absolute hippest memes, after all. “-this means war.”

Armsmaster tensed up, rapidly stepping back to get a bit of space between us.

What the hell? Why did he react like that?

I cocked my head to the other side, raised my eyebrows, and went over what it might look like from his perspective.

Ah. Right. Woooops.

New controller of the Endbringers threatens you with war. No matter how much of a meme reference it was… yeah, whoops.

“A prank war,” I clarified, chuckling a little.

At that the tension seemed to bleed away from him. “Ah,” he said, almost sounding like he wasn't relieved and coming down from a fight or flight response. It was a good attempt, but bite me Armsy, I'm an Entity. “That is much better than I believed.”

Well. Can't have him getting too comfy.

I grinned at him and snapped my fingers. “We'll see,” I sing songed, making sure to hit exactly the right frequencies that would make him twitch.

The Boardwalk was a destroyed wreck with a few buildings repaired one second… and then the rest of the buildings began flowing into existence, their materials coming out of nowhere like thousands of streams of water.

I was dissolving a tiny asteroid to pull this off, but what the hell, it's not like I had a shortage of those in my Shards’ reality. Something like several hundred billion of that size or larger in the Asteroid Belt alone.

And as I had just declared a Prank War upon the now twitching Armsmaster, I added a building. It was far down the Boardwalk and one of the first I built in this massive wave, but unlike the other buildings it didn't house something that was here originally.

No, that was Protectorate's Secret. I'd made the most heavily suggestive lingerie store on the Eastern Seaboard, created several lines of sexy underwear (or notwear!) for each Brockton Bay Protectorate member, and threw them all into a tiny mockup of the Rig.

With Armsmaster's ‘Mark II - Lady Function Killer’ panties front and center.

I didn't stop grinning as Armsmaster looked around in shock. He probably didn't see the Secret store, as I hid it down an alley, but he'd find it eventually.

“Your move, Armsy.”

---

“Soooo…,” Assault said, sidling up to the winged teenager. “Ziz, right?”

Ziz nodded and turned her visual attention from watching Taylor and Armsmaster bicker to the host approaching her. “Ethan,” she greeted him. Not coldly, but not warmly either.

The revealed parahuman chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, I guess it'd make sense that you know who I am,” he lamented sheepishly.

“If you believe us, and don't assume Legend has been compromised,” Ziz replied easily.

Ethan opened his mouth to refute her statement, thought better of it, and went silent.

“Yeah. I know,” she continued nonchalantly. “I know you're on the fence. I know your wife isn't, and I also know why.” Ziz nodded her head backwards in the direction of Battery.

Ethan tried to look surprised, he really did, but something about her just told him to expect stuff like this. Knowing things.

It might be that she was adamant that she was the Winged Endbringer, but he wasn't sure.

“Ask her sometime about that favor she owed Legend. Don't be surprised when what you learn shocks you. Because it will,” she assured him. “You are very good at taking and rolling with punches, but the truth of what's really going on? That might be enough to put a cap on the madness you can handle.”

She said all this in a perfectly sweet and innocent tone of voice, an annoyingly perfect and innocent smile on her face to match it.

Ethan narrowed his eyes at her and pursed his lips. His suspicious expression was clearly intended to be mocking. “Well played," he eventually accepted, nodding. "Don't think I've heard that one before.”

If it was possible, which it apparently was, Ziz looked even more innocent for a few moments. “I pride myself on being original," she deadpanned back, words at odds with her still innocent tone.

The two of them held their tones and expressions for a good ten seconds… then broke down laughing.

Ziz's laugh sounded like the tinkling of bells crossed with a young teen's voice, if that voice was the voice of an angelic starlet. It had echoes of the Scream she used to use, but only a few good parts. Said parts Ethan had just discovered the existence of in his memories, and only by comparison, true, but they did exist.

His laugh was pretty standard. Or as his wife called it, demented cackling.

Ethan was barely aware of several of his teammates around them observing the winged Endbringer in girl form and him cracking up with the usual exasperation they reserved for him.

Damn, she was good. Get him and her laughing at the same time, demonstrate humanity. The fact she winked at him in the middle of her laughter when he figured it out just solidified his opinion of how crafty she could still be.

A few moments later their laughter started to taper off, into chuckles for him and giggles for Ziz. Perfectly matched tapering, he noticed. She wasn't going to stop before him.

So he let it naturally decay, an easy silence falling over both of them.

“I hate to ruin this thing," he started to say, gesturing between them, “that we've got going on, but I gotta ask; why?"

Ziz's happiness fled like a boat before a storm. “You mean why did we attack?" she asked, sadly.

Ethan was taken aback. However, he'd picked the topic, brought it up, and now he needed to know. “Uh, yeah," he offered, lamely.

Ziz closed her eyes and sighed. “Well, you deserve to know," she declared. When she opened her eyes again and locked them on Ethan, her irises were glowing an ethereal white.

He gulped.

“We were Mastered," Ziz began. “Totally, entirely. Well, not technically entirely for me. I had a bit of breathing room due to my precognition, but that didn't matter, because I was Mastered. I couldn't do anything I would want to now. More to the point, I didn't want to then.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows. "Mastered… how?" he asked, frowning. “I don't think I've ever heard of something that would change your actual wants. Heartbreaker is the worst in the world, and even he just affects emotions.”

Ziz cracked a sad grin. “Heartbreaker," she said, scoffing. “Vasil wishes he had the power to affect anyone like we were.”

Ethan settled back on his heels, gesturing with his hand for her to continue her obviously incoming explanation.

Ziz nodded, then smiled at him, presumably to show she wasn't mad at him. “Think of the worst Master effect you can... then multiply it by a hundred, a thousand times,” she began.

Ethan blinked. “That sounds… bad.”

Ziz chuckled darkly and shook her head. “Ethan, it's not just an ability to command us. Taylor literally defines major aspects of our very beings. As did our old Master. We were destroyers, engines of death and pain, because that is the shape we were forced into by them." She nodded at Taylor, and grinned happily. “Just as I'm now almost human. Think like one, feel like one. Even the urge to be a hero comes from her.”

“Huh.” Ethan looked like he was actually thinking it through. “That's… I'm sorry?”

Ziz's happy grin cracked slightly, the corner of her lips threatening to start trembling. “Thanks. I'm not really sad about it, though. In many ways the only things I share with my past self are the powers, the memories, and a couple of personality traits not deemed unsuitable for my new role.”

“...So, you're… a different person?” Ethan summarized questioningly. "Not that I'm complaining, I like non hostile Endbringers, but doesn't that bother you?”

Ziz's full grin returned, aimed at him. “Engine of Destruction telling you that I'm a different person over here, and you actually care about my feelings,” she lamented, chuckling. “Only you, Ethan, only you."

The costumed kinetic manipulator smiled and shrugged. “What can I say? I've been told I'm a good guy like that,” he faux humbly stated. "Just don't tell my wife."

Ziz chuckled. “Indeed,” she agreed, rolling her eyes. “To answer your question: my past self would find my current state distasteful, much less my new directive. I, however, am happy with both, and not only because the guilt I harbor from my past self's actions is beyond human capability to understand.”

Ethan blinked. “Huh. I… guess I get it. But, uh, why are you telling me all this?”

Ziz smiled at him, and he felt as if he was a child once more. “I'm heroic now, Ethan, not dumb. I know your superiors are going to want psych profiles on us. I figured I'd head them off at the pass,” she explained succinctly. “The fact that their faces when they learn that you are the one they have to get those profiles from will be amazing is just a bonus.”

Ethan hesitated for a few moments as he processed that, then he cracked a grin too. “Yeah, I'd think so.” Then his eyes widened slightly and he took a small step back from her. “Ummm… that sounds a little… Plan-y, Ziz.”

Ziz snorted and rolled her eyes, slightly shaking her feathers for effect. “I am partially The Simurgh, Ethan. Planning is kinda my thing. Long, convoluted, and hidden plans are one of my core personality traits and were not detrimental to being heroic, so they weren't discarded” she explained. “I just use it for heroic things and saving people now.”

Ethan took another moment to process that, then smirked. “And trolling,” he added.

Ziz abruptly looked away and… winked, at Miss Militia. When she turned back to him, she acted as if she hadn’t done anything, even over his suspicious glare. Instead, she grinned conspiratorially. “Well, of course!” she agreed. “I've been doing that since day one!”

Ethan raised his eyebrows. “Really?” he asked. “I mean, what exactly could you do? Weren't you always either fighting us, or in orbit?”

Ziz nodded. “Yes, but that by no means denied me the ability to mess with the human race.”

Ethan looked unimpressed. “Really.”

“Yup. For one, I gave Dragon and all the Thinkers trying to predict my actions daily conniption fits, so that was nice,” Ziz revealed.

Ethan chuckled despite himself. “And… for two?” he asked, in the tone of one who knows they've come too far but wants to see the end.

Ziz's smirk was legendary. “Winged_One on PHO.”

Ethan looked at her oddly. “What?”

“I post on PHO, and my username is Winged_One,” she elaborated.

“You what.”

“Yup.”

Ethan's jaw dropped.

---

Dauntless stared up at the towering pillar of muscles standing next to him.

“So you're Behemoth," the hero eventually managed to ask.

The man who was… is? An Endbringer solemnly inclined his head. “I was."

Was.

Sure.

Dauntless looked him up and down, noting once more the unholy levels of musculature badly hidden beneath an ill fitting massive T-Shirt.

Was. Yeah, right. And I'm a Roman centurion displaced in time, Dauntless deadpanned to himself.

The man watched him, amusement clear on his face due to the slight grin and the crinkling of the skin around his glowing orange eyes.

Oh no.

“You do it too," Dauntless almost groaned.

A solitary eyebrow was raised by the man. “What do I do?" he asked, genuinely.

Dauntless sighed, then pointed over to where Miss Militia was having her own talk with, if these people, common sense, and Legend were to be believed, Leviathan's human form. “Miss Militia does the eye crinkling thing too," he offered as explanation.

The man's second eyebrow joined his first, then he glanced over at Dauntless’ teammate momentarily. “Ah," he said, nodding. “I see. The wielder of Weapons Sentinel shares many commonalities with myself. It is not surprising.”

Weapons Sentinel? What? Dauntless was confused… and surprised. “You do?" he asked, unable to keep his surprise from his voice. “I mean, she does?"

The man- no, Behemoth, Dauntless was convinced by that weird phrasing if nothing else, turned his burning gaze back on the hero. He held Dauntless’ eyes in his own for a few worrying seconds. Finally, he nodded, and spoke.

“We were both unwilling child soldiers in a war not our own,” he succinctly informed the hero.

Dauntless was stunned. “...Oh," he finally managed to squeak.

---

Miss Militia was experiencing that feeling known as complete and total disbelieving, dumbfounded amusement.

This was because she was talking with the now human form of Leviathan, and he sounded and acted more like a member of the Wards she mentored than an island and city destroyer.

An ice cream addicted, and mourning, teenager.

"There there," Miss Militia patted him on the t-shirt covered back. "We have ice cream at the PRT HQ. That's where we're going after this, so I can get you some."

Leviathan's face lit up like a kid at Christmas. "Really?!" he excitedly asked, literally jumping for joy.

Miss Militia struggled to keep her hand on his back and her smile carefully measured to show kindness, instead of allowing the severe levels of, as Clockblocker would say, 'WTF is going on' she was experiencing to show up.

“I’ll make you a water gun if you get me ice cream, like you said!” Leviathan cheerily said, closing his eyes and grinning ear to ear. He even held out a closed fist and pointed his thumb up, other hand on his hip.

Her eyes crinkled at the edges, and Miss Militia found herself no longer having to struggle to smile at all. “Sure, what kind of ice cream do you want?” she asked. “Just so I can radio ahead and make sure they have it.”

“Mint Chocolate Chip!” the vaguely middle eastern teenager announced proudly.

Miss Militia nodded, smiling ear to ear as well. His mood was infectious. If he was ever the Kyushu Killer, he certainly wasn't anymore. “Sure, just let me call?” she asked, pointing to her earbud.

He nodded eagerly, the far too cute action mirrored in the water shadow he still hadn’t turned off.

At their size it was less terrifying, and more adorable how it copied his actions.

The woman in fatigues found herself thinking one, traitorous thought. I want one. She then realized her thoughts, not helped by a surreptitious and teasing wink from The Si… from Ziz, as she’d said her name was, over by Assault.

Miss Militia turned away from Leviathan as she blushed red. “I just need to transmit codes that say we’re okay, alright?” she asked the teenager, trying not to stutter.

“Yep!”

And unknown to the woman who was like a second mother to the Brockton Bay wards, as she initiated a direct call to the PRT HQ’s kitchens, two proto-sapients in another reality were relayed her thoughtful request from the much smaller form of the Troll Bird.

Without their greater whole's knowledge.

No, Miss Militia was far too focused on her sudden realization that Leviathan had offered to make her a water gun.

---

Armsmaster managed to regain his composure remarkably quickly.

“Your display of power is impressive,” he steadily admitted. “But that will not stop the rule of law from at least attempting to corral you.”

Funny, it almost sounded like he was… warning, instead of outright commanding me.

I nodded knowingly. “I already guessed that might happen.” I held up a hand and flicked my wrist. Legend’s Shard was fed power from my new Zero Point Reactor Shard, then directed into the space around it.

A tiny fusion reaction burst into existence, my hand entirely embedded in it.

Armsy must’ve been getting used to my tricks, because he only barely flinched.

“They are welcome to try,” I stated flatly. I locked my gaze upon where his eyes were. Past his visor, it being exactly zero help to protect his identity from me. “You are welcome to try.”

He grimaced and completed my sentence for me. “It would not end well.”

I nodded and allowed the fusion reaction to dissipate. “To put it mildly,” I informed him, deadpan. “At the very least, I have five non-sandbagging Endbringers… or as I now call them, Friendbringers, under my control.”

Armsmaster’s eyebrow raised at my name for them. I simply rolled my eyes.

“And, as logic dictates, it should stand to reason that anything that can make Endbringers is much more powerful than them,” I continued. “The difference isn’t just slight, either. You know how you parahumans get your powers?”

“The Corona Pollentia and Gemma-” he began to answer, almost automatically.

“-are output and input nodes, respectively, for symbiotic biocrystal computation platforms lying on or in orbit of other Earths,” I interrupted him. “Shards. Each Shard is usually linked with one human. Severely limited in their scope, they provide their unique ability to the ‘parahuman’ in exchange for usage data.”

Armsmaster just stared at me, gobsmacked. His Shard, Efficiency, was slightly panicking at me blowing the secret on its true nature, but I merely instructed it that the particular ruleset governing their true nature was now defunct.

It stopped worrying after that.

“Those Shards, when linked together, can form a cohesive, usually sapient being,” I continued even more. “I am one of those such beings. My dad is another. Scion is yet one more.”

His gulp was audible from the Mayor’s Office, I’m sure.

“We are Entities. We are the source of powers.” I hovered slightly higher into the air and lowered my face until I was almost touching his visor. “Now, do you think your world could fight Scion, much less all three of us?”

Armsmaster shook his head rapidly.

I didn’t really know why I was telling him all this. It put my plan in jeopardy; Scion was more likely than not to notice me now. I would’ve been surprised that he hadn’t shown up already, but my senses showed his oblivious avatar perfectly at home saving an entire cattery which was on fire.

One cat at a time.

Gods, he couldn't even hero correctly.

As for why I was spilling the beans? I guess it was because Armsmaster was one of my heroes. And after the sting of Scion's, then Alexandria’s, betrayals of the concept of a Hero… I must’ve been clinging to the first one next on my list.

I didn’t have his branded panties for no reason, after all.

I nodded. “Good. Then we won’t have to.” I righted myself and smiled kindly. “For reference, I’m the helpful one. My dad is… well, he married my mom, she died, and he’s been kinda depressed,” I lamented sadly. “Plus he was trying to protect me from the Golden Idiot until I ascended. I’ve now done so, and thus, I am trying to clean up the messes that were made of our world.” I gestured to my Friendbringers, smiling even wider. “They’re just the first.”

Armsmaster just looked at me, stunned silent. His jaw was visibly dropped.

“I’m sure there will be a time when I’ll be more willing to answer some of your questions, but I just wanted an ice cream. Until my dad remembers to bring the people of the Boardwalk back, I can’t get it here,” I mused. Only a few more seconds lasted for my decision to finalize itself. Then I stood straight up, grinned a lot like Sarah would’ve, if my data from her Shard was accurate, and said a line I’d always wished I could say.

“So….. Take me to your leader.”

Ziz’s abrupt whoop of nerdy joy did nothing to help my composure.

---

The ride to the PRT HQ Building was filled with conversation and yet also not.

Ziz and Assault seemed to have hit it off. My winged Friendbringer was taking the Hearts and Minds idea I was sort of rallying my actions with the Protectorate around and running with it. To me it was obvious that she was trying incredibly hard to look like just another cape, another human. Laughing, giggling, telling jokes and getting Assault to laugh in turn.

I got an almost idle affirmative feeling from her over our link at the direction my thoughts had taken. She didn't look at me though, too 'engrossed' in talking with Assault.

Ben and Levi were doing their best, but neither had the manipulation skills of Ziz. In that aspect I supposed it was better, because any manipulation they tried to do would clearly fail and so they didn't even try. They came across as genuine that way.

Levi probably looked like just another Ward to the cape who'd taken to him. Miss Militia. I'd say I was jealous, but honestly I was still processing just who I was sitting across from.

As awesome as Miss Militia was, I was sitting across from Armsmaster.

As an equal, at the least.

The fangirling was real even if I was offloading it into a threaded environment so I didn't totally ruin the image I'd worked on this entire time with Ziz.

Ben didn't exactly have anyone gravitate towards him. He engaged in short conversations and answered questions from anyone who addressed him, but he seemed content to just observe. And be the intimidating tower of muscly goodness that his body had taken the form of, of course.

Emma had no such issues. She was in full chatterbox mode, just like her original had been when we were kids. Poor Khonsou was dragged straight into her shenanigans as she teased every person in the vehicle and talked about a million miles an hour.

It was amusing to me that the most powerful person in the van besides myself checked nearly every box on the blonde ditz list… besides the blonde or the lackluster intelligence anyways.

She was probably smarter than me, just because she was actually willing to use my Shards to their full potential with regularity. Emma seemed remarkably unworried about losing her humanity. I felt the unseen hands of her access across at least thirty of my Shards at all times. That was up from the ten or so she was mainlining when we'd left to get ice cream.

Then there was Armsmaster… and me. I'd unloaded a lot on him, that much was obvious, because he just sat across from me and watched me like I was a total enigma. The entire first fifteen minutes of travel time he was just silent. Processing, I assumed.

He finally spoke once we were closer rather than farther from the PRT Headquarters. He felt safer, subconsciously, the closer we got, my copy of Sarah's Inference Engine informed me.

"Was it true?" he asked.

I blinked and focused back on reality. "Uh," I stammered, "was what true?"

He visibly swallowed, his chin betraying what his armor covered throat couldn't. "What you said. About… Parahuman powers. And…" he trailed off, looking pained. "And you."

Ah. I closed my eyes and nodded to emphasize my conviction. "Yeah. Every word."

Just like every single thing I'd said to him so far, the lie detector program in his HUD system once again flashed TRUTH at my words.

Armsmaster let out a pained breath as he seemed to deflate against the surprisingly comfortable wall seat across from mine. "Oh."

He didn’t say anything for another few minutes, the van drawing ever closer to the PRT HQ.

“Thank you,” he suddenly said.

I jumped a little in my seat at the unexpected gratitude. Adjusting my glasses -oh, wait, I don’t wear them anymore, still gonna have to get used to that- I coughed lightly and blinked at him. “What?”

Armsmaster shuffled around in his seat a bit, clearly uncomfortable. Not that I was any more comfortable with this than he was, I hadn’t been thanked in over two years. “Thank you,” he repeated.

“What for?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.

“What for?” he parroted me, tone one of disbelief. He looked over to my Friendbringers, then back to me, and grimaced. “If your story pans out and it turns out you are indeed who… and what, you say you are, and they are who and what they say they are…” he scoffed and shook his head, looking down at the floor. Finally he met my eyes again, his visor the only thing preventing me from seeing those light brown orbs with my normal vision. “I admit the evidence is beginning to stack up. As insane as you sound, the Simurgh is gone from orbit-”

“Of course I am, how did you think I was sitting in this van with you?” Ziz interjected. More than a few of the other parahumans couldn't keep themselves from snorting at the very least.

Armsmaster continued on as if he hadn’t even heard her. “-and Dragon can’t find the normal signs of either Leviathan or Behemoth’s presence. So given the likelihood of your… ludicrous story being true is rising, and the potential shitstorm that is about to descend on all of us due to it, I wanted to thank you while I still can,” he finished explaining, squaring his shoulders. “Thank you, Taylor. For doing what your apparent peers failed to.”

I didn’t have tears in my eyes and anyone who says otherwise is a lying liar winged bird girl. “T-Thanks, Armsmaster,” I sniffed.

The man in blue armor across from me nodded definitively, then fell silent for the rest of the ride.

I hadn’t felt that happy in a long, long time.

Also, a side note for the Internet. Armsmaster not only had a sense of humor, he apparently must have been a damn good speechwriter.

 

Fourth
Chapter 8
Publicly Relative Teams​

The armored van entered an underground garage. I started keeping track of the location of my body and my Friendbringer's bodies from my real self as it was almost impossible to figure it out from inside the van.

Must've been intentional. I didn't miss how easy it would be to reconfigure these things to prison transports. They were nice and comfy and cushy for us, though, so we must be doing something right.

That or Legend's backing carried a lot more weight than I realized.

...Or they were so scared of us, the PRT wasn't going to make any sudden moves, like a person with a TRex breathing down the back of their neck.

It was probably a mixture of all three, if I'm being honest.

Anyways, the van entered an underground parking garage with other, very similar vans in it and the driver parked.

The engine shut down, and the Protectorate members in the van with us looked to Armsmaster.

He still seemed lost in thought, so I politely coughed and kicked his armored shin. Lightly, but not light enough to prevent the loud clang as my strength, even lightly, caused a sonic feedback from the metal.

Armsmaster almost jumped out of his chair even as I felt myself blush with embarrassment. His hand went to his halberd and he rapidly scanned for something. Danger, I assume.

I had to give the heroes with us credit, only Assault was unable to keep himself from snickering.

Armsmaster glared at me. "What was that for?" he asked irritability.

Losing my own ability to keep from snickering, I gestured to the driver, the uniformed and helmeted… woman who was snickering along with me. "I think we're here," I deadpanned, attempting to keep a straight face even though I'd just snickered.

Armsmaster didn't know I could see the scowl he sent me, but I just smiled angelically.

"Thank you for… informing me," he growled out, then stood up. "Come, the Director wants to meet you."

He turned to the back of the van and opened it. With a step off the van his armor landed on the pavement with a loud clang. The van lifted itself on its suspension. Noticeably. His armor was pretty heavy, after all.

Armsmaster stood there all imposing and looked back over his shoulder. "Miss Militia, please aid me in escorting them. The rest of you…" he looked over Assault, Velocity, Battery, and Dauntless as he said that, "hit the showers."

Assault snapped off a snarky salute and almost bounded out of the van, somehow skirting right past Armsmaster.

Battery groaned. "I'd better make sure he doesn't get in trouble," she lamented, ducking past the man in armor with an apologetic smile.

Armsmaster's shoulders tensed up, but she didn't notice.

Just before she left the van, she turned back to me as if suddenly remembering something. "Oh hey, if you need anything, just ask for me, okay?"

I nodded to her after a moment, smiling. "Sure thing. Thanks." Left unsaid between us both was that Legend had directed her to aid me… but she was genuine in her offer of assistance. My Shards could tell that easily.

She went off to deal with her husband, leaving the van behind.

Armsmaster's shoulders tensed even further and his free hand clenched into a fist. "Would anyone ELSE like to brush past my armor?" he demanded, sounding incredibly offended.

I kept myself quiet and glared at the smirk Ziz was wearing.

Velocity started to raise his hand.

"NO," Armsmaster declared, fully turning around to glare at the red speedster.

At this point Miss Militia's eyes were in full crinkle mode and she seemed to be having trouble keeping herself from chuckling, but she managed.

"We will all exit this van in an orderly, organized manner," Armsmaster declared, glancing at me as if pleading with me not to refute him. "Director's… guests, first."

And that's how my Friendbringers and I ended up on a Tinkertech elevator flanked by an irritated Armsmaster and a highly amused Miss Militia.

The poor guy's patience had clearly suffered quite an assault today, not just because of yours truly, and he definitely needed to recharge his batteries.

The ride wasn't long, only about a minute. Felt like a lot longer, though, especially when my three female Friendbringers started snickering under their breath at my wholly unintentional puns.

And then… the conversation started.

---

“I’ve always wanted to meet the Director,” Emma spoke up, to break the silence only previously interrupted by her snickering, Armsmaster's creaking and clenched fist, and the almost audible laughter that came from Miss Militia's wrinkled eye corners. “She seems nice.”

Miss Militia sent her a shocked look that she couldn’t see. Or rather, one she wouldn’t have been able to see if she wasn’t currently tapping into her sensors, surveilling the entire coast for anything dangerous to me.

Guess I wasn’t the only one on edge.

“She’s nice?” Khonsou asked, innocently perplexed. “But Ziz said she was a bi-”

Ziz slapped a hand over her mouth and gave the now glaring Armsmaster a sheepish smile. “Haha, wow, yeah, let’s not talk about what other me may or may not have said, okay Khonsou?” she asked, somewhat demandingly, and the other part pleadingly.

Khonsou’s reply was muffled, but the innocent and accepting “Okay!” was clear for us all to hear.

"The Director can be… a little intense," Miss Militia admitted, wincing to herself.

"Some of the time," Armsmaster hesitantly agreed. His fists relaxed and the stress began to leave his shoulders, one of my emotional detection Shards informing me that he was returning to normal now that he had something else besides Assault to focus on. "She has a difficult job. Normally I wouldn't speak of this, but you are aware of the state of the city, correct?" He looked down at us as he asked us the question.

I sighed, crossing my arms. "Yeah, Brockton Bay needs some work," I agreed.

I knew what he was talking about. The city was in a state of almost constant gang wars. Plural, due to the three main ones run by Parah- by Shard Hosts, and their general dislike of each other.

Ironically the one with the asian rage dragon was the best one of the three. The other two were literal Nazis, and druggies that drugged up others.

In my city's reality, rumors of forced prostitution and human trafficking were better than them.

Armsmaster nodded. "She has to oversee all of that, our Wards, and keep people safe on top of it," he explained, sounding proud for some reason. "A four way cold war that sometimes turns hot, and she's the nominal leader of the only good side. New Wave included."

"The city isn't split five ways anymore, though," Ziz spoke up.

We all turned to her in surprise, my Friendbringers included. "Excuse me? Five?" Armsmaster asked her.

Ziz nodded. "Before Taylor changed us and became what she is now," she began explaining, "there was you guys, the Druggies, the Nazis, the Asians, and one more; Coil's almost paramilitary faction." She grimaced and shook her head. "He's about to finish constructing his supposedly secret underground base and begin operations with his forces."

Miss Militia frowned and shared a wary glance with Armsmaster. "Armsmaster, what do we have on Coil?"

Armsmaster didn't reply for a moment, no doubt using his suit's systems to search for just that. "Not much," he admitted after his pause, "he's supposed to be a villain who employs mercenaries, but other than that, we have nothing." He turned his head to look at Ziz and seemed to consider a decision.

"Elevator, pause, monitoring systems off," he announced to the air.

The Tinkertech elevator slowed to a stop, letting out a single chime.

The massive array of Shard-driven sensors I'd barely noticed attempting to get information from me shut down, and suddenly we might as well have been invisible to the PRT HQ's systems.

On top of that, a huge connection I definitely hadn't noticed before due to its presence when I first met Armsmaster disconnected from his armor. Curious, I idly traced the path back through the Internet and hit a massive server farm all the way up in Canada.

Canada? Wasn't the Tinker Dragon from there?

I shrugged and let the thought fall onto my to-do list. I'd investigate that later. A server farm for a Tinker wasn't that unusual, after all.

"With or without breaking the Unwritten Rules?" Ziz asked, seemingly out of nowhere, right as Armsmaster was about to open his mouth.

My head snapped to look at directly her and I glared, prepping an internal command just in case I had to stop her from running her mouth.

I might not care about the rules that most capes apparently claimed to bind themselves by, but others would.

"Without, please," Armsmaster asked.

Ziz sighed and shook her head. "Okay, fine. But I will be obeying the letter of them, not the spirit," she declared, then hesitated. She looked to me with a worried and apologetic smile on her face. "That's… okay, right?"

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. "Yes."

Ziz nodded. "Right. Coil has the power to simulate two timelines. He can extract information in them and then cancel the simulation, so nobody would ever know," she began explaining.

Miss Militia frowned, looking quite worried. Armsmaster tensed up. "Any information?" Miss Militia asked.

Ziz nodded, but Emma stepped in. "Actually he's limited to normal Thinker Shard restrictions," she revealed, an amused smirk on her face. "So all of us are safe." She frowned, then, and looked at the two heroes. "Dunno about you two, though, or the PRT."

Ziz shook her head. "Oh no, he's definitely compromised the PRT," she insisted.

I wondered where all this was coming from. He sounded pretty dangerous, at least to Hosts. I wasn't worried about myself or my family… Emma was right. I took an idle peek at their focused databases and raised my eyebrows.

I knew that Shard signature.

It was one I'd noticed was connected to a Host in the building we were in, right now.

Coil was IN the PRT HQ Building, and no alarms were going off.

Two different things could be assumed from this. One, he was also a high level Stranger… though his Shard didn't seem capable of that. Like Battery's Shard, his seemed off, somehow. Like it was tired. It also accepted my administration codes without complaint… or reply.

Just like Battery's had.

Hmmm…

"How?" Armsmaster growled.

"You mean beyond his ability to interrogate any of you in a simulation?" my winged Friendbringer snarked back.

--

Armsmaster looked at me, his raised eyebrows supposedly not visible inside his helmet. “You’re alright with her telling us all this?” he asked me, disbelievingly.

I nodded his way and uncrossed my arms. “Yeah. I’m a Hero, and so are my Friendbringers, which nominally puts us on the same side… at least on paper,” I informed him. “I don’t actually care about the Unwritten Rules, either. I am having Ziz stick to them not because I fear anyone attacking my father or any of us over us breaking them, but because I’m afraid of how far I would have to go to stop them once they do.”

Miss Militia paled at the implication, and Armsmaster didn’t fare much better. “I am only assuming at this moment, but can I take your statement to mean it would not go well?”

“At the very least,” Ben spoke up, reminding everyone he was present due to his deep, booming voice. Even I jumped, and I’d been peripherally aware of him at all times due to how we were connected. The guy can be stealthy, apparently. “Even if we were to stay out of the battle, it is unlikely that all humans working together would be capable of injuring Taylor more than momentarily.”

The elevator was silent for a few moments.

“...Right,” Armsmaster finally spoke up. “We will… I’ll put that in my report.”

“Please do,” Ben suggested pleasantly, but it sure didn’t feel like a request.

I sighed and reached up to rub my temples. “Look, we’re supposed to be on the same side, okay? We’re all heroes, let’s act like them and stop discussing how badly shit would hit the fan if all the gloves came off.”

Ben and Armsmaster stared each other down for a few moments before looking away from each other.

“As you wish, Taylor.”

“Very well.”

Miss Militia scoffed and rolled her eyes.

Internally, I directed queries to my Friendbringers. [What gives?] I asked them.

The two responsible for this mess gave no external indication they’d received anything, but engaged me in discussion regardless. [They must be made aware that you are not to be taken lightly,] Ben directed my way.

Ziz chimed in with her own reason. [Taylor, they’re going to turn on you. Maybe not all of them, maybe not even the majority, but someone in this organization will think they can fuck with you and then they will try something stupid. You’ve already been betrayed enough.] She sent me the feeling of pleading and support. [We’re just trying to stop that from occurring.]

I closed my eyes and sighed. [I know that’s going to happen, guys, I’m dense, not naive. And I know Coil is here.]

At that they did react externally. Ziz and Ben’s eyes both widened, and they turned to look at me. A moment later, the conversation that Emma was having with Khonsou and Levi puttered out as they joined in looking at me.

[Way to be clandestine,] I sarcastically fired at all of them.

Armsmaster and Miss Militia noticed, alright. They looked at us as if we were incredibly weird, which given we were five teens staring at me silently, was understandable.

[You’re expecting betrayal?] Emma asked. Her face morphed to a look of hurt. [Is it because of my original?]

I opened my eyes and looked directly at her. [No. Well, at least not entirely,] I reassured her. [I just know enough about human history to see the obvious result that’ll happen at some point. And, once again, supervillain in the building!]

I really didn't want to talk about my expectations anymore. Thankfully, the Friendbringer that was my sister picked up my growing irritation over the conceptual network we had, and steered the conversation where I wanted it to go.

[What are we going to do about that, by the way?] Emma asked, crossing her arms. She frowned a little at me. [Disclosing his identity would be a violation of the Unwritten Rules.]

Ziz narrowed her eyes at Emma and I auspiciously, but a single check of my emotional state was enough to deter her. And thus, the rest of them. She sighed and shook her head. [I don't know. There's lots of ways to alert the PRT to his presence without breaking the Rules.] She looked over to me again and raised an eyebrow. [It all depends on what you'll let me do, Taylor.]

I grimaced, then glanced at the curious Miss Militia and the downright intrigued Armsmaster. I took a moment to investigate why he was so focused on our silent communications. A query to his Shard showed that it was feeding him designs for a mind-to-mind comms system.

And not sending him into a Tinker fugue.

Guess it really took my instructions seriously.

I shook my head to ward off my thoughts and refocused on the real topic. [I don't want supervillains around any more than you do, guys, and especially not in a position to further ease the PRT betraying me.] I sighed and shrugged, closing my eyes. [Without breaking the letter of the Unwritten but totally actually very written Rules in Piggot's desk drawer, go nuts and disable him.]

Ziz gained a very scary smile. A second later, so did Emma.

"I take it your mental conversation is finished?" Armsmaster spoke up.

Ziz and Emma turned to him as one unit, while the rest of my Friendbringers resumed talking amongst themselves. They quickly drew Miss Militia in via the power of Khonsou and Levi's cuteness.

"Taylor has given us clearance to help you take down Coil, as long as we don't break the letter of the Unwritten Rules," Emma informed him.

His eyebrows rose inside his helmet, but before he could speak, Ziz continued.

My winged Friendbringer tossed her long hair over her shoulder and fluttered her wings as a subtle reminder of what she used to be. "And that's a lot of leeway," she said, grinning wide. "For instance; Coil is in the building right now."

Armsmaster tensed up and Miss Militia immediately snapped her suddenly intense gaze to Ziz. "What."

"There's more!" Emma cheerfully stated.

"Yep!" Ziz agreed, nodding. "While I don't recommend ethnic profiling, if you didn't do some of that in the search for who Coil is, you'd probably miss him. Stereotypes unfortunately sometimes are accurate."

Miss Militia frowned. Clearly, she didn't understand Ziz's clue. "There are laws against that, not to mention morals-" she started to protest.

Armsmaster cut her off by holding out his armored arm in front of her. "No, Miss Militia, that's not what she's saying," he countered, but found himself not entirely convinced. "...Correct?"

Ziz just smiled angelically and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Anything more down that train of thought would be breaking the Unwritten Rules," Emma explained for her.

Armsmaster stared at the both of them for several moments. "...Message received," he finally acknowledged. He turned to the still offended Miss Militia and gave her something that was vague, but definitely got the point across. "They could have picked a less morally laced way to phrase it, but I understand what they're trying to deliver," he informed her.

Miss Militia seemed like she was going to keep going… and then it clicked. Her mouth opened underneath her scarf and she let out a little 'oh.'

"Indeed," Armsmaster confirmed.

"That's… really?" she asked, turning to Ziz with a bewildered look about her eyes.

Ziz nodded, but said nothing more.

Miss Militia took a deep breath and blinked to clear her confusion… and probably whatever traumas Ziz had unintentionally (or intentionally, honestly I couldn't tell) dug up for her. "Any other nuggets of wisdom?" she finally asked.

Ziz shook her head and mimed zipping her mouth shut.

Emma, on the other hand, wasn't as worried about my orders. Rightfully so, as it was unlikely I would punish her for things Ziz couldn't get away with. At least, that's what I kept telling myself; in the back of my mind and three threads of thought away, I acknowledged I wouldn't be able to punish any of them, ever.

They were my first friends since Emma's original betrayed me.

"Actually yeah," she spoke up. "Coil's secret base is like a bunker. A really tough, durable fortress." She locked eyes with Armsmaster and nodded her head at herself, Ziz, and the rest of my Friendbringers. "Coil constructed it himself to resist them, after all."

Miss Militia's eyes widened and Armsmaster cursed.

"You're joking," Miss Militia pleaded.

"Nope." And with that, Emma zipped her lips too.

The two capes turned to me, almost as if they wanted me to refute what they'd heard.

"All true. And whatever conclusions you come to with this information are entirely yours," I told them, stressing that last bit. "Just remember how his power works if you do find out who he is, because he wilI likely know everything you think he will, and a lot of things you don't think he will. Uh… I think you have something called Stranger Master protocols? I'd recommend operating under the maximum level of whatever those are."

Miss Militia swallowed, the sound audible in the silent elevator, and Armsmaster sighed.

"Very well. Thank you for enlightening us with this... interesting information," he stated flatly, then turned back to resume the position he'd been in. "After I resume the monitoring systems, I will need to go address this. Miss Militia can take you the rest of the way. To the Director."

Miss Militia hesitated. "Armsmaster, won't you need help?"

He pressed a button on his halberd, and it rapidly shifted into a much more menacing form. Spikes erupted from the blade's edge, two guns which looked an awful lot like tasers popped out of the sides of the handle, and several parts began to glow. He sent his teammate and second in command a smirk. "I can handle one villainous precog," he affirmed.

He hesitated, then, and turned back to me. "He is just a precog, right?" he asked, hesitancy clear in his voice where before there had been none.

I took another glance at the Shard I now knew to be Coil's, checking what it was telling me against my own copy. Other than the fact mine was no longer short on energy, or 'tired', they were identical, and their cycle limits, though pretty corrupted, stated they only have the ability to the host that Coil's Shard initially reported. "Yeap," I confirmed, nodding and popping the p. "Just a precog. A pretty limited one, too, even though he's managed to figure out how to munchkin it to a frankly impressive degree."

Armsmaster relaxed, once more confident, but raised an eyebrow. "Munchkin?"

Miss Militia was the one to tell him. "Clockblocker explained it to me. Basically, finding out how to exploit a given set of rules to your advantage."

"Ah," Armsmaster nodded. "Well, munchkin or not, I'm going to show him just how real this timeline is." His hands ground the metal of his suit around them and he gave the command. "Elevator resume. Monitoring systems on."

Just like that, all the systems that had been watching us before switched back on, and the elevator continued its ascent.

I tried not to shiver now that I was aware of their existence.

"Well, I'll take you to see the Director while Armsmaster is busy," Miss Militia announced, her face all smiles and no worries again. Damn she was good. "I'm sure she'll be interested to hear your stories too."

[Act natural,] Ziz poked me, stopping me from looking at the American flag themed cape like she was nuts.

I stared at my Friendbringer with internal disbelief, but a somewhat contented face on my body. [The monitoring systems?] I guessed.

Ziz nodded. She then turned to Miss Militia and smiled widely. "Speaking for myself, I want to get my story out there, and especially to Director Piggot," she announced. "I've… my previous self has had a wing or two in some of her traumatic past and I need to apologize."

Holy shit Ziz, that's one way to torpedo the conversation.

Miss Militia raised her eyebrows. "...Well," she managed. "I'm sure she'll at least listen. Don't know about the forgiveness, though. She doesn't do that easily."

Ziz put on a brave face and stood her ground. "I still want to try."

I found myself feeling just the littlest amount of pride. She was trying to own up to her past self's actions and make up for them.

That littlest amount was a torrent just as large as the debt she had to repay, but I would refuse to acknowledge it if anyone asked.

Thankfully nobody did. The elevator arrived with a pleasant chime, and the door opened to a hallway.

"I'll see you all later," Armsmaster said, stepping off the elevator. "Keep them content, Miss Militia."

The man clunked away while Miss Militia nodded.

Since none of us were leaving, the door closed, and suddenly Miss Militia found herself the focus of the eyes of five Friendbringers… and me.

The fact all of us were eons more powerful than her couldn't have been far from her mind, but she grinned through it and at least attempted to seem like she wasn't scared.

"So, shall we go see the Director?"

 

Looks at Fourth thread again
Last threadmark year: 2020
Current year: 2023

FUCK, I KNEW I FORGOT SOMETHING!

---

Fourth
Chapter 9
Warding Thunder​

The elevator came to a smooth stop near the top of the building and the doors chimed to indicate they were about to open.

"Here we are," Miss Militia quickly said, trying and nearly succeeding to look like she wasn't on the edge of running out of the elevator.

Her Shard, Sentinel, provided her a very powerful ability to regulate her own emotions and a defense against sanity drain, but even it wasn't really prepared to deal with being stuck in an enclosed space with three fans of her without any backup, two of which were Endbringers and another of which the very kind of being that gave the human race powers in the first place.

Yeah, they filled her in about that. After asking me, of course, but I saw no issues with it.

Everyone on the planet would know eventually. They deserved to. And Armsmaster would no doubt tell her relatively soon after he finished frogmarching the living stereotype of a Bond Villain down to the PRT building's cells.

Coil was probably not doing very well seeing as I'd given his Shard a directive to make all his simulated timelines fail while Armsmaster was apprehending him.

I didn't even have to use my access codes. The Shard was a surprisingly intact Thinker one, and even had a little bit of the higher level functions running.

What limited thought it had saw the opportunity as one that would rightfully generate a lot of conflict in its host.

Couldn't have happened to a better guy.

Back to our own area of the building, I'd managed to tone my own fangirling of Miss Militia down for the most part. Ben joined me in my restraint, and other than Levi extracting another promise for ice cream from the flag themed heroine, he was content to just play with some water above his hands.

That didn't freak the Protectorate member in the elevator out at all… after the third time she let herself look at it.

Ziz, on the other hand, had joined right in with Khonsou and Emma's squeeing and begging for autographs.

The little Khonsou was totally legit about her wish to fawn over Miss Militia. Emma was genuinely fascinated with the heroine life, and it wouldn't surprise me if later on she asked me to let her go out and play hero. We'd wanted to do that as kids after all, and despite the fact that I'd made this Emma more or less myself, she was effectively my sister.

And Ziz… well, Ziz admired Miss Militia like the rest of us yeah, but she was definitely primarily involved to mess with her. It was her thing now, she told me over direct comms. She messed with you if she liked you. Even if she was scared of you.

Explained why she managed to overcome her fear of me to do what little needling she had… but I didn't feel great about her being scared of me.

She'd been burned by two Entities before me, so I understood why she had that response, but it still hurt a little.

Whatever, I'll just have to prove to her that she can totally trust me! Yeah, that way she can feel safe to let her guard down around me, and then I can hug her without her flinching! Plan Hug The Birb is a go!

Ziz looked back at me with the weirdest confused expression I'd ever seen on her, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

I just smiled and waved back at her to reassure her there was nothing to worry about. You can't hear my evil, evil plans to get your hug ratio up anymore since I figured out the channel system, nya nya nya nya nyah! I singsonged in my own head, pointedly not broadcasting it anywhere.

Ziz squinted her eyes at me suspiciously, but my lack of anything but smiles gave her nothing to go on. She let me know she thought I was being weird with an eye roll and turned back to continue messing with an increasingly nervous Protectorate heroine.

Ben liked the woman who had found herself being our guide pretty much purely due to the fact she could deploy nukes.

That he could eat.

She demanded in no uncertain terms that we never reveal that.

Either of those things.

There was also something about being child soldiers, but I wasn't touching that with a 10-ft pole.

And Levi?

Well. Levi had a promise of ice cream. And apparently had promised Miss Militia a water gun in return for that ice cream.

Even with what I was now, even with my new state being so far above everything else on the planet… my sense of humanity still recoiled at the thought of what exactly a water gun meant to the being who used to be the Endbringer connected to water.

With my overview of the emotional states of my little group complete, I took a few moments to send off a message to my dad.

[Dad, I fixed the boardwalk. Mind bringing the people back?]

His reply was, of course, immediate. Although there was one slightly concerning thing.

Or two.

[Sure thing kiddo! What do you want to do with that thinker and her friend though? She's been sort of… I want to say half freaking out and half worshiping me?]

I freely admit it took me way too long to process that. [She's what?]

[Yeah so it turns out the Cycle limitations on her Shard are not exactly the most solid things ever? Also, it's an Inference Shard, and they both are sort of made for each other, so they have a very high compatibility. Basically, her Shard was letting it spill as to what we are in the ice cream parlor and hasn't really stopped. Her brain would probably have exploded if I wasn't keeping her healthy.]

…What the hell. I didn't even know where to begin.

[Dad, I don't know what to tell you. Just fix it. Keep her as a worshiper if you have to. And her boyfriend. But, put everyone else back please!]

His reply was tinged with amusement. That ass! He was teasing me! [Sure thing Taylor. Do you want me to include the people who died too?]

My blood momentarily felt like it chilled. It didn't, I was monitoring my body closer than anything else on the planet, but it still felt like it. Didn't my Friendbringers act? Didn't they stop it?

No, of course not, they couldn't have. Ziz hadn't seen it coming, so none of us did either.

Who expects the Ash Beast to appear out of thin air?

My emotional management Shards went into overdrive as I felt myself start to hyperventilate. [People… died?!]

The response I got from my Dad wasn't what I expected, but in some ways, it was exactly what I expected.

[Only momentarily,] was his attempt at reassuring me. [I helped them get better.]

I reached up and pinched the bridge of my nose, a sudden headache related to the rapidly draining away panic forcing me to massage it back to whence it came. [I don't want to know, I don't have to know, and you are having way too much fun with this,] I sent him.

He quickly replied with pure unending feelings of amusement.

[Less troll, more fix, Dad!]

[Yes, honey,] he teased me. But what few observation platforms I had in his reality showed his power systems shunting to different sectors, so clearly he was at least attempting to do something.

Wait.

Since when did I have observation platforms in my dad's reality?

[Dad, did you give me a way to watch you?]

[Sure did! It's only fair, right?]

[...You do remember what I said about what looking at our Shard bodies feels like to me, right?]

[Yep!]

Okay. That's it.

He wanted to tease me?! It's not like I was having a panic attack over here or anything!

Well fine then!

I stretched out my reach from my core, grabbed an asteroid, dropped it through a dimensional portal, and chucked it at him.

He casually sideswiped it with an energy surge from his surface, but I could hear his laughter echoing through the space-time around it.

I shook my head at my dad's antics…

And then the door opened.

---

"Miss Militia!" a tall, somewhat thin man called out to our escort the moment the doors opened wide enough that he could see us. "Something has happened to the Dir-" he trailed off when his eyes traveled to us. "Well. Hello!" He greeted us in a somewhat friendly way, then turned a strained smile to the heroine beside us. "Who're they, Miss Militia?"

Both Ziz and I could read the unsaid context. Something similar to why did you bring a bunch of civilian teenagers into a secure area without prior authorization?

Ziz wanted to say something no doubt incredibly trollish, but I raised my mental hand to halt her. She pouted. It was adorable. It didn't stop me.

"Deputy Director Renick, I'd like you to meet Taylor Hebert," she introduced me, stepping out of the elevator. My social shards told me she'd only said his name so that we'd know what it is. "And her… Friendbringers."

"Nice to meet you?" he half asked, half told us.

We waved at him, though Khonsou and Ben curtsied and bowed.

"Why are they here?" he rounded on Miss Militia again.

She let out a long sigh which sounded a little bit offensive in how much suffering it implied. "I imagine for the same reason the Director probably drunk herself into a coma." She turned to the shocked Deputy Director and raised an eyebrow. "Am I wrong?"

"...No," he hesitantly answered, looking at us out of the corner of his eye, "but how did you guess?"

"Because honestly I feel a little bit like joining her."

Renick stepped back in shock. "You? Militia, what is going on?"

Militia sighed again, brought her fingers to the bridge of her nose, and gestured to us. "Taylor here has, apparently, not only gained control of all the Endbringers, but changed them into effectively teenagers like herself, and also made a new one, and that's just the verified parts of this headache."

Renick stared at her like she'd lost her mind.

"It's true. Legend backed them up."

Hearing that, the Deputy slowly turned his head to look at us one final, much more heavily weighted time.

I tried to look as innocent as possible.

Emma leaned on my shoulder to look cute and dragged a protesting Khonsou to my side as well.

Ben just bowed, respectfully. Levi didn't notice.

And Ziz?

She threw up a fucking peace sign and gave him the most gremlin-like smile she could.

The staring contest, though it seemed more like a posing contest from where I was standing, lasted an agonizing five seconds.

Then I whacked Ziz on the head and the spell seemed to break.

Renick let out the deep, long breath he'd been holding in. "I have to admit, this is not what I expected to deal with when I woke up this morning."

Miss Militia snorted. "Isn't that the truth."

I shrugged and tried not to look as guilty as I felt. These were heroes trying to save our city, and yeah sure they had issues actual doing that, but I didn't want to make their jobs any harder. So the fact I had, even though I'm sure they were unendingly grateful to me for (totally on purpose) taking the Endbringers and making them into non threats, still plucked at my heart a little.

"Sorry? But hey, at least the only thing they'll End now is your cafeteria,” I responded jokingly.

Renick tensed. "Why do they want to do that?" he asked carefully.

Not stopping us, not arguing, just asking why.

Clearly I needed to work on my jokes if they terrified people this consistently.

Miss Militia groaned. "Forget it, Renick. She makes jokes. They're usually terrifying in ways she doesn't get. You'll get used to it."

He completely ignored her lack of using his title to gape at both of us, my group and Militia.

Levi finally spoke up. "Miss Militia promised me ice cream!"

"...Oh." a great weight seemed to leave Renick's shoulders. "I can see why the Director drank that much, now."

"Hey!" I said back in mock offense. Then something occurred to me, and I stepped off the elevator and out of my Friendbringer's arms. "Speaking of the director, you said she's… she's in a coma, because of me?" I fully admit I was very quietly at the end there, guilt wracking my heart even more.

Miss Militia's head shot straight up and she glared at me. I had no idea why until she opened her mouth, sternly. "No, not because of you. Yes, Director Piggot did… consume an alcoholic substance to the point where it overcame her particular health issues, and as a result of that she is in a coma, but those were most likely not your fault."

I found myself giving him the most deadpan look I could and raised an eyebrow. I didn't even need any of my Shards to understand that that was some bullshit.

Renick winced. "Alright, it may have partially been because of the situation you were involved in," he admitted.

I just saw it and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Where is she? If she's done this to herself because of me, I have a duty to heal her as much as I can." Director Piggott was legendary in the city. My city. She didn't deserve this. Didn't deserve having to deal with me. Not after what she went through.

Miss Militia spoke up. "We've tried to get her healed before, but she has categorically refused parahuman healing."

Renick looked like he was going to try to protect his boss, but a sharp look from the heroine shut him down. He just sighed and nodded.

I, however, grinned as wide as I could. You don't grow up a Union man's daughter without a good grasp of technicalities. "Good thing I'm not a parahuman then. Or human."

Renick and Miss militia both stared at me, taken aback. As if for confirmation, their gazes roved over my Friendbringers, but of those who actually paid attention to them, all they saw was nods.

Renick sighed again, but this time he was smiling too. Almost… conspiratorially. "She'll likely be angry at you," he offered as a last, token resistance.

I pulled my arms around Emma and Khonsou and just grinned at him. "If she's able to be pissed at me, that means she's healthy enough to do it."

Miss Militia laughed. Emma high fived me, and even looked proud. Khonsou squeaked at being hugged, and Ziz just… she stared at me, like she'd never seen me before.

"Honorable actions may not be accepted by those they are meant to save occasionally," Ben concluded for all of us. "That should not stop us from performing those acts."

I could see it when Renick folded. "Okay. I'll follow your lead. Are you sure you can heal her?" he asked me.

The hallway past him but around the bend. My sense of direction handed to me by several shards told me that was where I was supposed to go. I nodded and started down it, letting go of my Frendbringers. "I have far too many ways to heal her. No matter what human condition is screwing her up, I can fix it. What'll take time is deciding which way to do it."

I turned around and continued backing down the corridor, looking over to my Friendbringers. "Hey, head on to the cafeteria with Miss Militia okay? I'll be there as soon as I heal the Director."

Ziz sent me a thumbs up, Emma looked amused, but nodded, and the other three were building a… water castle? with Levi's powers.

Renick wasn't following me.

I stopped. Why wasn't he following me?

"You coming?" I asked, confused.

"Taylor, the medical wing is the other way," Miss Militia spoke up, bemused.

Stunned and rooted to the ground. That must be what had happened. I spun around on my heel, marched down the hallway, looked around the bend to see a bunch more hallway, then turned right back the other way.

Everyone had definitely been laughing at me. Either in their heads, or in the case of Ziz, openly snickering.

That damned spatial Shard was getting recalibrated, I swore.

I glared at the winged mockingbird, then pointed down the hallway in the other direction. Past all of them. "I knew that!"

"Sure," Emma chimed in, grinning at me.

"Oh shut up miss I Scan Everything Around Me At All Times," I grumbled, stalking past her.

"It pays off~" she singsonged back at me before she fell into step behind me.

I rolled my eyes at her and bumped her hip teasingly. "Whatever you say."

Emma smiled at me. Her smile. The one I'd lost for so long, my friend's smile. I didn't know how much I'd missed it. Or her concern for me.

"Are you sure you're okay to do this? You know," she asked, gesturing back at the PRT members of our group, "alone?"

"Nothing in this building can hurt me, Emma," I reassured her.

"Physically, yeah. Emotionally, though?"

Shit. She was right.

I was pretty vulnerable as it was, and an about to be healed woman who might not see the technicalities as good things could say a lot to hurt me in a very short amount of time.

I sighed and shook my head, smiling at my friend. "Thanks, Emma. But I think I've got this. Call you in if I don't?" I offered her.

She nodded decisively. "You better."

I placed a hand on her shoulder and lightly, affectionately squeezed. "I will."

With that, I took a glance back to keep an eye on what had been happening behind us in our little moment of tenderness.

My other Friendbringers had followed us in line, Ben bringing up the rear, and Deputy Director Renick was talking to Miss Militia with a worried look on his face.

"How much aspirin am I going to need to hear whatever you have to tell me, Miss Militia?" he asked, clearly dreading the answer.

She sighed and just followed us, shaking her head even while she smiled under her bandana. "There isn't enough on the planet, Renick."

"...Oh."

"Does the Director still have anything left in her bottles, or did she drink it all?"

The Deputy Director was clearly surprised at Miss Militia's lack of what he probably thought was decorum, but rallied anyway. "She only managed to get through six drinks before we found her, so I should assume so?"

"Good. You're going to want the hardest liquor she owns."

"Oh. Oh… dear."

"After that, I'm going to the cafeteria with them to make sure that a bunch of PRT and Protectorate members meeting a bunch of… Friendbringers, over a lunch meal, doesn't end in tears."

"Laughter can cause tears," Ziz pointed out, voice dripping with snark.

"Don't make me hit you with another fifty caliber."

"Ooh, promises promises~"

Miss Militia blushed, then definitely scowled under her superhero getup.

I was happy that they were bonding, especially considering each of them had fought the other a few times when Ziz was in her old form, but I was uncertain about my feelings on them bonding over letting loose and being snarky.

Ah well. What's the worst that could happen?

The moment I thought that, I winced. I knew it would come back to bite me eventually.

---

Despite taunting Murphy, nothing much happened. Yet.

Miss Militia peeled off from us, guiding my Friendbringers into another elevator, while Renick led me through a set of doors into what was clearly their hospital wing.

There was some resistance and reluctance from the doctors and nurses present, at least until I snapped my fingers and healed dozens of PRT troopers in a second flat.

Panacea had nothing on me.

Speaking of her, I definitely needed to meet Amy Dallon and give her Shard an unlock. She, of all people, definitely deserved it. Healing so many people and doing so much good on such a low power budget, but I wasn't a hundred percent positive what hers was configured for, had to be really stressful.

My Shards notified me that I'd actually met her once before, and that's why I had so easily attained myself a Shaper copy as my first non core Shard. It's why the original Shaper even picked up my extremely amateur attempt at the equivalent of a phone call. She'd directly worked on my body, so she immediately knew just what and who I was, and wanted on board with an Entity who knew how to drive.

Shaper itself… herself? also revealed what she'd done to put my body back into a normal human state after the Locker. The data I was getting… if I'd been mortal at the time, without Panacea's intervention, I would have died.

Amy's getting way, way more than an unlock, I promised myself. She saved my life. I could do no less for her. And I was sure her original version of Shaper was getting impatient at this point.

It was quick after healing the troopers. The medical wing staff led me into the Director's room. I held my hand over her body, weak and pale from the coma…

And I healed her.

That was that.

Well, it was a little more complicated than that, and I may have misread Shaper's instructions so much that I wound up overdoing it slightly and regenerating her until she was about twenty years younger… but I was sure after she got over it she wouldn't mind.

Whatever had happened to her destroyed a remarkably good looking woman. I may have been primarily attracted to men, but I wasn't blind.

The doctors and nurses were pretty happy. I wouldn't be around to see her wake up though, because Renick bustled me out of the room as fast as possible.

Probably a wise decision all told.

But then something did happen. And Murphy was an absolute bastard for forcing the dilemma on my mind.

As we walked out of the hospital wing, it hit me.

She could do it again. Drink herself into a coma, again. It would take a lot more than she had this time, but it wasn't impossible for a human to do.

And she probably would, just to spite me. Just as legendary as Director Piggot's strength and tenacity were, her stubbornness was well known.

We couldn't have that. The city needed her. The world probably did too. Once whatever traumas she had were cleared out of her system or handled via therapy, she would probably be an incredible force for good.

And all it required for me to ensure that outcome was to violate her free will just as badly, or possibly worse, than the other entities that had found my world.

"Damn it," I cursed under my breath.

"Hmm? Taylor, are you alright?" Renick asked, looking up from his phone.

I waved him off with a simple "I'm fine, don't worry about it."

But inside I was anything but fine.

I tried to reason it out with myself. And I found a potential solution, though it still left a distaste in my mouth.

She had definitely been compromised by something. Trauma, her physical ailments that I'd just washed away, frustration at my own situation… who knew. And I wasn't going to try and read her mind to find out.

Her decision making was suspect. Shocking, I know, since she'd willingly drunk herself into a coma. That painted a very sorry picture of her mental state.

Hell, for all I knew, her agency wasn't valid at the moment at all. So I just had to ensure that she survived until I could actually talk to her.

The real woman, underneath all her problems. A clear head, so to speak, one capable of properly expressing free will.

That was easy for me to ensure. I didn't like it, but I could at least live with myself. And if she still wanted what I was about to do to be removed from her at that point? I'd do it. No questions asked.

With a wave over my shoulder I located Director Piggott stewing in her medical room, and targeted her for a delayed trigger.

A painless one. One that didn't require any trauma. All it would take is her going to sleep, and the clock ticking over. At 12:00 midnight, her connection to a couple of my life management Shards, and an energy displacement one, would initialize.

The way I'd set up her power expression was simple. Ultimate defensive invincibility on the tier of my Friendbringers accomplished via dimensional shunt of dangerous forces and energy. Ultimate cellular regeneration, partially harvested from whatever hit her. And a little bit of super strength on the side just as an enticing bonus.

And I was going to tell nobody.

Not even my Friendbringers would know.

That was the least I could do for her.

---

Future Canon Omake Content: Cafeteria Wardens

---

I walked into the Wards section of the PRT HQ with several of said Wards, fresh out of the PRT Cafeteria and with stomachs full of surprisingly tasty food.

All my Friendbringers were behind me, the Wards interspersed, all talking to each other. I was even included sometimes, but I could tell the feeling was more like including a mom than a teenage peer.

That was okay. I'd get them to accept me as one of them eventually. For now, I was content being the slightly scary, confusing pseudo mom figure to a bunch of Friendbringers who the Wards didn't know exactly how to react to.

I'd had enough teenage bullshit in Winslow for the next few months.

Not that anyone we'd passed saw that. They didn't notice any of it. We really did look just like a bunch of teenagers (and two preteens) even if some of us were in costume. I wasn’t really sure why all the Wards were trailing me instead of one leading me to their room, but oh well. They'd seemed to assume I'd know where to go due to my powers, and after my recalibration of the spatial awareness Shard using data off my fresh new copy of Vista's so that I could realize that spatial awareness Shard had managed to somehow spatially invert its sensors, they were kinda right.

Pretty sure whatever traps and tests the organization was running on us were spitting out the digital equivalent of bricks at this point, but there wasn't much I could do to be less terrifying.

Nobody who wasn't a Thinker would ever guess that five of the people in the group could detonate the planet if they put their mind to it, and don't get me started on me. Nor would they guess that I'd copied the Shards of every host in the building, regardless of their costumed state.

The number of untriggered Parahumans was surprisingly high. Five people, four PRT officers and a secretary, hadn't actually managed to trip their particular Shards' trigger mechanisms.

After some deliberation and reflection on what I'd already done to their leader, I induced more traumaless triggers on a circumstance delay in all of them. They'd go to sleep tonight and wake up with superpowers. Without a Conflict Drive.

It was exceedingly difficult to disable active Drives without tipping off the host that their power was being modified, as doing so unlocked non combat ways they could use the power by default. But disabling them before the Shard went active? Dead simple.

If someone without the ability my Administrator Shard had tried, pretty much any non-Cauldron Shard would send a distress signal off to Scion, but I didn’t have that problem.

I'd get around to fixing the already active ones eventually. Well, once the PRT had the chance to calm down about my already revealed scary reality and could stomach more without just breaking in half.

Either then, or when Emily realizes she's healing. It was a tossup as to which might happen first.

There were three non costumed but still active Parahumans in the building. There had been four when we arrived way earlier that day, but given what I was seeing in Coil’s Shard he deserved every ounce of the sucker punch Armsmaster delivered to his cranium. I mean, really, you've been apprehended by Armsmaster of all people, your timelines aren't working, and you decide to use information you've tortured out of him in another timeline to push his buttons? Armsmaster isn't a saint.

The three non-Coil, non-costumed Parahumans had it easy. I wasn’t going to reveal their existence (mostly because I was fairly certain the PRT already knew who they were) and I wasn’t going to even talk to them if I could manage it.

Instead, I just copied their Shards alongside the costumed people with Shards. Who knows, maybe they were Thinkers on payroll other than the ones I'd detected, I'd have the chance to find out way later after I got bored enough to query more of my new copied Shards.

I was snapped out of my idle contemplation by the sudden, wholly unwanted and definitely unwarranted application of two phase shifted crossbow bolts to the chest.

“What the hell?” I asked, brushing off my completely undamaged shirt. Alexandria’s powers, fully unlocked, are bullshit.

I grabbed the bolts in my other hand and inspected them closely.

Huh. I could’ve sworn I'd seen these somewhere before...

“What's wrong, Taylor?” Carlos asked, hovering above me.

“I dunno, someone shot me with-” I began to say as I trained my senses on the actual room in front of me.

One teenager, girl, around my age. In costume. Phased. Clearly Shadow Stalker.

Ahhhh, yeah. That's where I'd seen the bolts before. On her show.

But why the hell would she shoot me? We were both heroes!

I began to raise my eyebrows in real time while I queried her Shard for information.

[DATA]

What I got back…

[Reality Phase]
[Host: Sophia Hess]

Well, that's what sent me over the edge. After the day I'd had, the several mental breakdowns, and the sheer surrealism of it all… seeing her, here, in the Wards HQ, the location dedicated to heroes… it momentarily broke me.

All my thought threads collapsed back into my main avatar thread. All the emotions I'd been feeling all day, and dealing with by way of the few emotional management Shards I had on top of venting the excess in simulation, smashed into each other and became a roiling void of HATE.

Emotional management Shards can only do so much.

I can only scream at walls and detonate simulated planets so much.

When my tormentor shows up? In front of me? As a hero?!

No. That's where my line is. But hey, at least she had it coming.

Honestly. She really, really did. Sophia Hess, Darwin Award nominee of 2011… and possibly the grand winner. I wasn't sure about that, given some other people on my world and their potential reactions to my existence, but Sophia was certainly in the running.

After all, it's not really a great idea to attack the one you tormented for years when they outmass you by several planets.

And this fucking idiot had just done so twice. On top of that, if I hadn’t been immune to her phase shifting due to my own Shards even with my Flying Brick body, she’d have likely killed me.

...Which made it her second try on my life.

I made a promise to myself to keep the number of tries I’d give people to end my existence down to one in the future.

And then I crushed the puny bolts in my hand as easily as I would a piece of paper.

I could hear her gulp from the doorway.

My eyes locked onto her shadowy form almost automatically and I directed a portion of Legend’s energy manipulation towards my irises, flaring them. “SOPHIA.” I bellowed, my voice layered in what probably sounded like several different variations of the Abrahamic punching bag.

Even my instinctive use of a new Shard didn't snap me out of it.

She looked scared. Her body language was downright terrified.

But I no longer cared.

I tore into her Shard without hesitation. Ripping, shredding, bombarding, the works. I reached across realities and broke her power in half.

She screamed, of course. The Shard itself was in an incredible amount of pain and I was certain it spilled over to her.

But any sense of mercy I might have been capable of feeling at that moment was entirely absent from the possibility of comprehension for her.

I held her there, cutting through the slight reality displacement like a monomolecular blade through butter, and refused to let her fall to the ground as I utterly. broke. THAT. BITCH.

None of the Wards tried to stop me. I was glad for that, because I honestly don't know what I'd have done to them in those moments if they had.

Eventually, there wasn't anything significant left of her Shard to fracture. Nothing vital, anyways. So I drew back my reach from her particular Shard's reality. Even in my enraged state I wouldn't let it go to waste, though; I copied what was left to a new version of what I now knew to be her Shard. I wanted a record of what she used to have… and what I'd done to her. With two of her Shards serving as before and after.

However, I also wouldn't allow Sophia to die.

Not yet.

Not like that.

If I was going to kill her, or rather when, I would make it long and sweet.

I wouldn't let her die, physically or mentally, before my turn.

My influence once more extended to her Shard's reality and I began to push the fractured thing back together, adding in just enough copied mechanisms of my Shaper to ensure my goals were met. Specifically, I rebuilt her Shard so it would monitor her condition and force invulnerability and immortality on her, based extremely roughly on the framework I'd developed for Piggot. I also felt Path to Victory chime in with a suggestion which was far too sadistic not to use, and so added that as well.

But I did not give her pain resistance. If I'm honest, I actually forced her to feel pain twice over.

She'd feel that pain. The same misery she put me through.

But she could never end it.

And just in case, I added an entry to my Shaper to do the same thing her Shard did now, in the unlikely case she found some way to turn her interface off.

Finally I allowed her to collapse. Her limp body hit the floor, convulsing, and she whimpered.

I wouldn't let her die. But suffering? Oh yes. She fucking deserved it.

I merely glared down at her twitching form, sympathy completely absent from my mind.

“Carlos,” I called to the shock-frozen Ward, “it was nice to meet the Wards. Thank you for offering us a tour of your building.” My voice sounded like ice warmed over steamed in a pot straight from hell.

He didn't speak, merely choosing to stare at me with awe… and definitely fear. I was sure the fact I called him by name didn't help.

But that was okay. He should fear me. Just a little. I could never let the PRT, or the Protectorate, think they had control over me… and I was now very iffy on displaying friendship. Armsmaster’s, Miss Militia's, Renick's, and the Wards' efforts earlier and the fact my Friendbringers approved were working wonders on me...

But… after all of everything she put me through…

They still called SOPHIA a Hero.

But I'd throw them one more bone. They were owed that much, at least. “Call me so we can finish the tour once you've cleaned your house of this…” I declared, turning back to look at the pitiful excuse for a sapient being, “trash.”

And with that, I whirled around and stormed out of the Wards HQ.

I led my Friendbringers out of the PRT building without any opposition. I expected them to try and stop me due to what would probably look like an overreaction to one of their Wards shooting me, given what I'd heard of the PRT before now, but nothing happened. I didn't even get any dirty looks on the way to the lobby of the building.

They were good actors. Most of them. They kept everyone who wasn't good at that out of my way and even opened doors for me politely. Pretty sure Renick said something to me at some point, but I was way too burned out at that point to listen. A part of me found it a shame that nobody was dumb enough to fight me. I was certainly itching for a fight with them.

But that was fine. It was okay. They feared me enough to just let me go after I nearly crippled one of their wards, and to my emotional state at the time that was good.

I flew us through the skies of Brockton, not even allowing my Friendbringers to travel under their own power, and back to my house.

Only then did the emotional management Shards kick back in. My thoughts once more split into many, and the dense core of hatred I'd been feeling the whole time evaporated along with them.

I broke down crying in my sister's arms.